Idioms crosslinguistically universal?

john at research.haifa.ac.il john at research.haifa.ac.il
Fri Nov 18 09:38:33 UTC 2011


It seems very unlikely that there are any languages which don't have idioms
but I have a feeling that certain typological features will result in more
idioms. The languages I've studied for which learning idioms seemed to
constitute the biggest part of learning the language is definitely Chinese,
I think because the morphemes are all monosyllabic whereas the words are
generally bisyllabic, the result being that the semantic connection between the
bisyllabic word and the two monosyllabic morphemes that it's made up of is often
tenuous--put another way, in order to satisfy the general preference for
bisyllabic words, Chinese speakers have been very creative in combining
morphemes. I have the same general feeling about Circassian and Dinka,
two other languages in which morphemes are almost always monosyllabic, although
I've studied them much less.
John




Quoting jess tauber <phonosemantics at earthlink.net>:

> I've been in discussions with a linguist studying idioms in English and we
> started wondering whether all languages have idioms. I've already found
> online mention of projects comparing idioms in Eurasian areal perspective.
> But have enough studies been done on languages elsewhere to be able to claim
> universality as a form-class? In Yahgan, for ex.,idioms seem to have a very
> restricted distribution (generally certain noun-adjective compounds). Has
> anyone looked at this from a typological POV? I'd be posting this to LINGTYP
> but I usually get very few responses there. Thanks.
>
> Jess Tauber
>
>




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