spilled, are the beans in a nice, neat pile? Where are the beans supposed to be?
After the beans are spilled, are they easy to retrieve?
Most speakers can form mental images for idioms likespill the beansand an-
swer these questions about their mental images without difficulty. Even people
without a conscious image for this phrase can answer these questions. Partic-
ipants in one set of experiments were asked to describe verbally their mental
images for idioms with similar figurative meanings in as much detail as pos-
sible (Gibbs & O’Brien 1990). We also queried subjects about the causation,
intentionality, manner, consequences, and reversibility of the events described
in their mental images (What caused the beans to spill? Was the spilling done
intentionally or by accident? Where were the beans once they were spilled? Is it
easy to get beans back into the container?).
We expected a high degree of consistency in participants’ understanding
of their mental images for idioms with similar meanings because of the con-
straints conceptual metaphors (e.g., THE MIND IS A CONTAINER, IDEAS
ARE PHYSICAL ENTITIES, and ANGER IS HEAT) impose on the link between
idiomatic phrases and their nonliteral meanings. If people’s tacit knowledge of
idioms is not structured by different conceptual metaphors, there should be
little consistency in participants’ responses to questions about the causes and
consequences of actions within their mental images for idioms with similar
nonliteral interpretations.
The data we obtained supported our hypothesis. Participants’ mental images
for idioms with similar figurative meanings were highly consistent with 75% of
their mental images for the different groups of idioms involving similar general
images. These general schemata for people’s images were not simply represen-
tative of the idioms’ figurative meanings but captured more specific aspects of
the kinesthetic events with the images. For example, idioms such asflip your lid
andhit the ceilingboth figuratively mean ‘to get angry,’ but participants specif-
ically imagined for these phrases some force causing a container to release
pressure in a violent manner. There is nothing in the surface forms of these
different idioms to constrain tightly the images participants reported. After all,
lids can be flipped and ceilings can be hit in a wide variety of ways, due to
many different circumstances. But our participants’ protocols revealed little
variation in the general events that took place in their images for idioms with
similar meanings.
Our subjects were also quite consistent in their responses to the different
probe questions about their mental images for idioms (over 88%). The probe
question data were particularly useful for showing how our understanding of
idioms is motivated by different conceptual metaphors. Consider the most fre-
quent responses to the probe questions for the Anger idioms (e.g.,blow your
stack, flip your lid, hit the ceiling). When imagining anger idioms people know
that pressure (i.e., stress or frustration) causes the action; that one has little
control over the pressure once it builds; that its violent release is unintended
(e.g., the blowing of the stack); and that once the release has taken place (i.e.,
once the ceiling has been hit, the lid flipped, the stack blown), it is difficult to
reverse the action. Each of these responses is based on people’s folk concep-
tions of heated fluid or vapor building up and escaping from containers (ones
that our participants most frequently reported to be the size of a person’s
Idiomaticity and Human Cognition 741