The Borderline between Collocations and Idioms in Persian: A Construction-based Approach

The purpose of the present article is 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.



1. Introduction

One of the important distinctions between idioms and collocations has always been its semantic aspect. Another important distinction between them is related to the lack of syntactic changes in idioms. Therefore, one of the main characteristics of idioms is the immutability of their constituent elements. In relation to the syntactic changes of idioms, Mel'čuk points to four syntactic changes including passivization, clefting, dislocation, and interrogation which can cause the displacement of the constituent elements of idioms (2014). In this article, using the linguistic intuition of Persian speakers, we seek to investigate whether these syntactic changes occur in all Persian idioms or only in a limited set; and if we observe the occurrence of this phenomenon, whether our definition of idioms is the same as the previously known definitions or we should go to a new definition of them. It seems that we are not faced with an idiom in its general sense, but we will have a new form of a collocation where a lexical element will play the role of a pivot and another lexical element will play the role a function. The main goal of the current research is to analyze idioms from a new perspective and evaluate the structural differences of idioms and collocations. Actually, by using the above 4 syntax tests, we are trying to recognize two types of expressions in Persian.

Research Question(s)

The research questions of this study are as follows:

1. Based on what criteria can idioms and collocations be separated?

2. In which area or areas of grammar can the criteria for distinguishing idioms and collocations be explained?



2. Literature Review

Construction Grammar (CxG) is a cover term for a number of grammatical theories and models within the field of cognitive linguistics. The most basic unit of study in this grammar is construction, not the syntactic units or those rules that combine these syntactic units together. According to CxG, the basis of language communication is a set of fixed expressions in the mind of language speakers, which are memorized like a formula. From this point of view, linguistic expressions as pairs of form and meaning are considered the main and formal unit of language (Goldberg, 1995 & 2003; Sinclair, 2004). Constructions in CxG, just like words, are a combination of form and meaning. These constructions are basically considered symbolic units (Croft, 2007, p. 472). They are associated with syntactic, morphological, phonological and pragmatic meaning. According to Goldberg, C is considered a construction if and only if C is a pair of form and meaning in such a way that some aspects of Fi or some aspects of Si cannot be entirely predicted from the components of construction C (1995, p. 4). In this definition, the symbol F stands for the word ‘form’ and the symbol S stands for the word ‘semantics’. Therefore, the pair shows a symbolic unit. Indexes also show the symbolic relationship between form and meaning.



3. Methodology

In the present research, the most up-to-date available sources, namely The Colloquial Persian Dictionary (Najafi, 2008) and The Two-volume Dictionary of Kenayat-e Sokhan (Anvari, 2019) have been used. First, the data, which consists of 200 idioms, were extracted from the relevant sources. Then, those idioms were listed according to the previously mentioned definition. In the next step, the changes and displacements of the elements present in the idioms, i.e. passivization, clefting, dislocation, and interrogation were investigated. In this way, at least 15 Persian speakers as research participants were used to judge the well-formed data resulting from the syntactic changes. In fact, by using the above 4 tests, we tried to give a new definition of idioms.



4. Results

Out of the total of 200 idioms that were examined, about 40 idioms were used in the passive construction and produced sentences that had the same meaning as the idiom. Approximately 50, 60, and 50 idioms also produced meaningful sentences in clefting, dislocation, and interrogation constructions, respectively. The result of the final analysis of these 200 idioms shows that on average, a quarter of these idioms show flexibility against these four syntactic constructions. The above result indicates that the constituent elements of some idioms can be displaced and used in different constructions like collocations. Therefore, such expressions are collocations, not idioms.

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