Idioms crosslinguistically universal?

[Geoff Nathan]

A number of years ago Jerry Sadock (who, I don't believe is on this list) gave a paper at CLS in a session on metaphor, back when that stuff was trendy. He argued that Greenlandic ('his' language), while it did have idioms that traded on metaphorical meanings, never lost their literal meanings, which were equally likely. to be invoked. Going strictly on memory here, I recall an example of the 'word' (Greenlandic is also polysynthetic, of course) 'arrange sheets/bedding', which could mean 'make the bed', but it could also mean 'arrange sheets'. I think there was one about setting the table that had the same double meaning. It's not exactly that the language doesn't have idioms, it's that they always seemed to retain their literal meaning as well. 
(Apologies to Jerry if I've gotten this wrong.) 

Geoff 

Geoffrey S. Nathan 
Faculty Liaison, C&IT 
and Professor, Linguistics Program 
http://blogs.wayne.edu/proftech/ 
+1 (313) 577-1259 (C&IT) 
+1 (313) 577-8621 (English/Linguistics) 

----- Original Message -----


From: "Matthew Dryer" <dryer at buffalo.edu> 
To: funknet at mailman.rice.edu 
Sent: Friday, November 18, 2011 7:18:50 AM 
Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] Idioms crosslinguistically universal? 

The two languages I have worked on the most differ dramatically in how 
much they use idioms. Walman, a Papuan language, has many idioms. 
Kutenai, an American Indian languages, has few if any. The difference 
seems to be related to the fact that Kutenai is polysynthetic. Kutenai 
essentially has the morphological equivalent of idioms, in combining 
roots within stems in ways that are the analogue of idioms. I know of 
at least one other polysynthetic language which is similar. 

Matthew Dryer 

On 11/17/11 6:49 PM, jess tauber wrote: 
> 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 
> 
>