The Cognitive Motivation for Idiomatic Meaning
One interesting characteristic of idiomaticity is that most languages have many
idioms with similar figurative meanings. For example, American English has
many idioms referring to the concept of getting angry (e.g.,blow your stack, hit
the ceiling, blow off steam, bite your head off, get pissed off). Another example is that
American speakers may usespill the beans, let the cat out of the bag, blow the lid off,
orblow the whistleto convey the idea of revealing or exposing a secret. Accord-
ing to the traditional view of idioms, there is no particular reason why we
might create and use so many different expressions to convey roughly the same
idea or concept. Each phrase’s meaning is supposedly determined by separate
historical situations that have evolved into pragmatic conventions of use.
Again, the link between an idiom and its figurative meaning is arbitrary and
cannot be predicted from the meanings of its individual words.
Do people understand that idiomatic meanings are arbitrarily determined?
Or is there some underlying motivation for the figurative meanings associated
with idioms? Contrary to the traditional view, the figurative meanings of idi-
oms might well be motivated by people’s conceptual knowledge that is itself
constituted by metaphor. For example, the idiomJohn spilled the beansmaps our
knowledge of someone tipping over a container of beans to that of a person
revealing some previously hidden secret. English speakers understandspill the
beansto mean ‘reveal the secret’ because there are underlying conceptual met-
aphors, such as THE MIND IS A CONTAINER and IDEAS ARE PHYSICAL
ENTITIES, that structure their conceptions of minds, secrets, and disclosure
(Lakoff & Johnson 1980). Even though the existence of these conceptual meta-
phors does not predict that certain idioms or conventional expressions must
appearinthelanguage(e.g.,thatwehavetheexpressionspill the beansas
opposed tospill the peas), the presence of these independent conceptual meta-
phors by which we make sense of experience partially explains why specific
phrases (e.g.,spill the beans) are used to refer to particular events (e.g., the
revealing of secrets).
My claim that idioms are partially motivated by conceptual metaphor con-
trasts with the traditional notion that idioms arise from dead metaphors.
Scholars adhering to the traditional view confuse conventional with dead met-
aphors. They insist that idiomatic meaning arises mostly from historical cir-
cumstances that are opaque to contemporary speakers and have little to do
with ordinary human cognition. But determining whether an idiom is dead
or just conventional requires, among other things, a search for its systematic
manifestation in the language as a whole and in our everyday reasoning pat-
terns.Oneoftheadvantagesofnotsimplylookingatisolatedexamplesbut
instead examining groups of idioms, especially those referring to similar con-
cepts, is that it is easier to uncover the active presence of conceptual metaphors
(i.e., metaphors that actively structure the way we think about different do-
mains of experience). There are plenty of basic conventional metaphors that are
alive, certainly enough to show that what is conventional and fixed need not be
dead (Lakoff & Turner 1989). Part of the problem with the traditional view of
idioms stems from its inability to reflect contemporary speakers’ metaphorical
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