an idiom means through an analysis of the meanings of its individual words,
but we can do more than throw our hands up and simply assert that the
meanings of idioms are arbitrary and noncompositional.
It is very important to understand that the independent meanings that the
components in idioms contribute to their phrases’ overall meanings are not
necessarily their putative literal meanings. Thus, to say that phrases such as
blow your stackorspill the beansareanalyzabletosomedegreemeansonlythat
their individual components contribute some sort of independent meanings to
the phrases’ overall interpretations. Listeners do not necessarily understand
blowandspillorstackandbeansin their most literal senses. Instead, we under-
standspillas independently referring to the act of revealing thebeansor the set
of ideas that are being held secret.
Most linguists and psychologists view the problem of idiom comprehen-
sion as one where a reader or listener encounters an idiom and at some point
switches from a normal, literal mode of processing to a more specialized, non-
literal mode of processing (i.e., where the stipulated meaning of the phrase is
directly retrieved from the lexicon). I reject this widely held belief. It is unclear
whether people actually switch from one mode of processing to another during
idiom comprehension. In the first place, there are good reasons to believe that it
is nearly impossible even to state what a word or phrase literally means (Gibbs
1984, 1989, 1994). Even when parsing very literal expressions such asThe cat is
on the mat, it is by no means clear what constitutes the literal meanings of the
words in this sentence or the literal meaning of the sentence as a whole (see
Searle 1979).
As is the case with many figurative language researchers, most idiom schol-
ars mistakenly assume that the literal meaning of any word or phrase can be
uniquely determined and that the literal meanings of idioms can somehow be
easily distinguished from their figurative or nonliteral meanings. For example,
the contrast between idioms and their literal meanings, metaphors and their
literal meanings, metonymies and their literal meanings, ironic statements and
their literal meanings provides very different notions of literal meaning. Em-
pirical studies show that people have multiple, often contradictory, concepts of
literal meaning that are implicit in scholarly discussions of linguistic meaning
and interpretation (e.g., literal meaning as conventional meaning, context-free
meaning, truth-conditional meaning, subject-matter meaning) (Gibbs, Buchal-
ter, Moise, & Farrar 1993; Lakoff 1986). People appear to apply different senses
of the concept of literal meaning in different ways depending on the kind of
utterance, the context, and the task. Moreover, many psychological studies
demonstratethatpeopledonotaccessthesameinvariant,literalmeanings
each and every time they encounter a word in spoken or written discourse
(Gibbs 1994). In general, we cannot assume that the words in idioms or entire
idiom phrases have easily determined literal meanings. We do not have an
adequate sense of what is meant by literal meaning or word meaning (and
these are different notions) to continue assuming that idiom processing begins
with some literal analysis and then switches to a specialized idiom mode of
understanding.
This conclusion about literality and idiomaticity may be disturbing to many
language scholars who continue to adhere to the idea that word meanings can
736 Raymond W. Gibbs Jr.