IDIOMS AS LINGUISTIC EXPRESSIONS

All idioms have at least two meanings; the linguistic meaning of the words and phrases themselves, and the stipulated idiomatic meaning. The meaning of idioms can be acquired, while that of the familiar idioms could either be retrieved or transformationally generated. Retrieval would be accomplished by direct access to stipulated idiomatic meaning, while generation would be realized by ordinary linguistic processing by applying the contextually suitable idiomatic meanings of the constituent words. This article exploits issues which concern idioms as linguistic expressions. It deals largely with those tenets of idioms as linguistic phenomena. Thus, it focuses on salient data on the structure and meanings of idioms which were collected for linguistic analysis. Among others, the work covers idiomatic creativity, polysemous hypothesis, concept of minimalism, phrase versus words, semantic compatibility consideration, anaphoric referent, idiomatic variants, morphotactic and idioms allowable combination, infixational elements and idiomatic compound. The work adopts canonical theory of idiomatic analysis.