[Lexicog] an English idiom

[Richard Rhodes]

As for someone whose office is directly across 
the hall from George Lakoff's, I'll say this is 
not just a figure of speech, but a metaphor in 
the usual literary (pre-Lakovian) sense.
	Of course, George would have an analysis 
for it with 'swallowed up in sorrow' being doubly 
metaphoric, mapping large expanses onto faceless 
faces having virtual mouths, and then mapping 
sorrow onto a large expanse. But even though 
something along this line is the right analyses, 
it misses the point, as Lakovian analysis 
regularly does, that there are metaphors like 
this one are very conscious (in contrast to the 
MORE is UP kind). And that "loosens" the reins of 
metaphor, to speak metaphorically. So it makes 
some sense to observe that there is often a kind 
of agency associated with metaphorical 'swallow 
(up)'

	'the ship was swallowed up by the sea'

but not so much when the expanse is more locational

	'the ship was swallowed up in the sea'

The point is that these are quite close. The 
agency can be quite bleached. (160,000 hits 
googling 'swallowed up by', 143,000 hits googling 
'swallowed up in'), including the interesting 
pair at: http://www.rense.com/general43/she.htm. 
The title is "Swallowed up by emptiness", but the 
line in the text is 'She is swallowed up in 
emptiness, ....'

And there are plenty of straight transitives, 
like 'the earth opened and swallowed them up', 
where the agency on the part of the expanse can't 
really be bleached.

The expanse can also be something expanding.

	those formerly suburban areas that have 
been swallowed up by urban sprawl

There is also a sense with 'in' (but apparently 
not with 'by') in which the identity of the 
entity is not lost, like

	'they were swallowed up in the crowd'

which means only that they were lost from view.

While my gut reaction is that in spite of all 
this semantic subtlety, Wayne's expression 
shouldn't appear in a dictionary. But then I 
hesitate and ask myself, where does this kind of 
information go in a thorough description of a 
language. Should there be an extended entry for 
'swallow' that captures all of this? The trick is 
that 'sorrow' is not a metaphorical expanse 
except when predicated of 'swallow'. This leads 
to the question of how to manage such 
collocational facts.

I don't know if these ramblings suggest anything 
to anyone out there. But the question of what 
makes for a true idiom as opposed to what makes a 
metaphor worth entering in the lexicon is worth 
discussing.

Rich Rhodes

>Well said, John.
>
>I think that most of those who focus on the 
>non-compositionality of idioms also, even if 
>only tacitly,  also include conventionality 
>(establishedness through usage) as a criterion. 
>If a phrase is non-compositional but novel, they 
>talk of figures of speech instead of 
>idiomaticity. If a phrase is conventional but 
>not saliently non-compositional, it may be 
>called an idiom, but is more likely to be termed 
>a cliché or something of that sort.
>
>For me "my soul is swallowed up in sorrow" is a 
>perfectly understandable figure of speech, but 
>not conventional, even though the extension of 
>"swallow up" to mean something like "overwhelm" 
>is reasonably conventional. (Not enough to make 
>it in as a sense in the Webster online entry for 
>"swallow", though, I notice.) If you allow 
>"swallow up" to mean overwhelm, the phrase is 
>compositional, but if you take "swallow (up)" 
>only in its prototypical physical sense, the 
>phrase is non-compositional.
>
>--David Tuggy
>
>John Roberts wrote:
>
>>With Wayne's query: "Is "My soul is swallowed up in sorrow." an idiom in
>>(Modern) English?" aren't we struggling with what we understand an idiom to
>>be?
>>
>>Most definitions of what an idiom is focus on the decompositional nature of
>>idioms. For example, these are some definitions I pulled off the net:
>>
>>% an expression whose meanings cannot be inferred from the meanings of the
>>words that make it up
>>% An idiom is an expression whose meaning is not compositional - that is,
>>whose meaning does not follow from the meaning of the individual words of
>>which it is composed.
>>% An expression whose meaning is not predictable from the usual meanings of
>>its constituent elements, as kick the bucket, hang one's head, etc., or from
>>the general grammatical tules of a language, as the table round for the
>>round table, and which is not a constituent of a larger expression of like
>>characteristics.
>>% a sequence of words which functions semantically as a unit and with an
>>unpredictable meaning (eg kick the bucket, meaning die). This is generally
>>accompanied by a degree of syntactic restriction.
>>% an expression that does not mean what it literally says (eg, You're
>>driving me up a wall.)
>>% An idiom is a phrase or expression whose meaning cannot be understood from
>>the ordinary meanings of the words.
>>% a sequence of words which forms a whole unit of meaning
>>% an expression that does not mean what it literally says
>>% is a group of words that, taken as a whole, has a meaning different from
>>that of the sum of the individual words
>>--- and so on
>>
>>Under any of these definitions "My soul is swallowed up in sorrow." is an
>>English idiom.
>>
>>But some of the definitions pick out another understanding of what an idiom
>>is - and that is a common expression well known to the speakers of the
>>language. E.g.
>>
>>% A common expression that has acquired a meaning that differs from its
>>literal meaning, such as "It's raining cats and dogs" or "That cost me an
>>arm and a leg."
>>% an expression in the usage of a language that has a meaning that cannot be
>>derived from the conjoined meanings of its elements (eg, raining cats and
>>dogs)
>>
>>On this basis "My soul is swallowed up in sorrow." is not an English idiom.
>>
>>A while ago we had someone on this list asking if he could make up English
>>words. He was told he could but whether they would catch on and actually
>>'become' English words was another matter. Isn't it the same with this idiom
>>of Wayne's. Someone has made it up and it qualifies as an idiom in a
>>technical sense but it has never caught on because most English speakers
>>have never heard of it.
>>
>>John Roberts
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
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-- 
******************************************************************

  Richard A. Rhodes
  Department of Linguistics
  University of California
  Berkeley, CA 94720-2650
  Voice (510) 643-7325
  FAX (510) 643-5688

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