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1- Allameh Tabataba'i University
2- Allameh Tabataba'i University , r.gandomkar@atu.ac.ir
2- Allameh Tabataba'i University , r.gandomkar@atu.ac.ir
Abstract: (1000 Views)
The purpose of the present article was to provide a new and practical definition for idioms and collocations, based on syntactic criteria, not merely semantic. One of the important criteria for distinguishing these two types of phrases (idioms and collocations) is the flexibility of their constituent elements. Idioms and collocations have not yet been studied within a syntactic approach. According to Construction Grammar, idioms were analyzed based on four syntactic tests: "passivization", "clefting", "dislocation" and "interrogation". Construction Grammar is a set of cognitive grammars that considers construction as a symbolic unit consisting of form and meaning poles. Two hundred idioms were analyzed. These idioms were collected from two main sources, namely The Colloquial Persian Dictionary (Abolhassan Najafi, 2008) and The Two-volume Dictionary of Kenayat-e Sokhan (Hassan Anvari, 2019). The four constructions of each idiom were judged syntactically by 15 people as research participants. The meanings of some of these constructions showed that the syntactic flexibility of all idioms is not the same. Some idioms were flexible to syntactic changes and therefore behaved similarly to collocations. The flexibility of idioms led to the introduction of a new definition of these types of phrases based on syntactic criteria. Thus, such phrases were considered a kind of collocation, not an idiom. In other words, those lexical phrases were called idioms which were inflexible to these syntactic constructions.
Article Type: مقالات علمی پژوهشی |
Subject:
Linguistics
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