[Lexicog] Re: on idioms and Phraseology

[Rudolph Troike]

Thanks to David Tuggy for the helpful quotation from Ron Langacker. What
is missing from his comments, and the present discussion, is the recognition
of a whole tradition of study and teaching devoted to this branch of
linguistics in Russia and circum-Russian countries, labeled "Phraseology".
It is even the focus of one level of language teaching/learning in
universities. I don't know how much of this literature is available in
languages other than Russian and others of the area, but this would be
the place to start -- the tenor of the present discussion has been that
this whole field must be invented or explored from scratch. Additionally,
the advent of computer and online concordancers makes it easy to examine
n-grams of varying length in corpora, so the compilation of such collocates
is greatly facilitated.

The place of phraseology in a theory of language, lying between lexicon
and grammar, is something that has generally been ignored in the West,
but it is surely an important component of language learning, whether
first or second. I'm reminded of Alton Becker's rejection of Chomsky's
autonomous syntax by arguing that all of language is recycled combinations,
and that this is how we learn language. Old-time philologists (a term
of reproach during the heyday of the Structural Linguists) recognized
the metaphorical and phraseological nature of language, and as one of
my old professors phrased it, "all word meaning is frozen metaphor".
(Examples of German Kopf and French tete, both = "head", come to mind.)
As Ecclesiastes says, "There is nothing new under the sun", and some
of these insights have been around for a long time.

    Rudy Troike

P.S. The remark about the grammar/phonology interface brings up the
amusing fact that ardent Chomskyan Minimalists are currently trying
to stuff more and more of grammar into the phonological component (PF)
in order to keep the "narrow syntax" pure and elegantly simple.


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