activity’), andpass the buck(meaning ‘to ignore one’s responsibility’) all refer to
salient acts in series of events. Even the classical phrasekick the bucketis meto-
nymic in referring to the last live act that a pig does before dying. In each case,
a salient act has a ‘‘stands-for’’ relationship to an entire idea or event.
Although metaphor and metonymy individually motivate different kinds of
linguistic expressions, there are many cases where these tropes are combined in
idiomatic language. Consider first how we get metaphors for which there is a
link with their metonymic origins (Goossens 1990). One instance of this is the
phraseto be close-lipped, meaning ‘to be silent or to say little.’Close-lippedcan be
literally paraphrased as ‘having the lips close together’ or as ‘having the lips
closed.’ Whenclose-lippedis used to indicate that a person is literally silent, we
therefore need the metonymic reading. If, on the other hand, we describe as
close-lippedsomeone who is actually talking a lot but does not give away what
one would really want to hear from him, we have a metaphor (given the sali-
ency of the metonymic reading, we have a metaphor from metonymy).
Another kind of interaction is metonymy within metaphor. Consider the
phraseshoot your mouth off‘totalkfoolishlyaboutsomethingthatonedoesnot
know much about or should not talk about.’ The source domain in this meta-
phorical mapping is the foolish use of firearms that is mapped onto the target
domain of thoughtless linguistic action. When the wordmouthis integrated into
a scene relating to the use of firearms, it must be reinterpreted as having the
properties of the gun alluded to in the phraseshoot your mouth off.Inthetarget
domain, however, there is a first level of interpretation that amounts to some-
thing like ‘to use your mouth foolishly,’ in whichmouthmetonymically stands
for the speech faculty. This interaction of metonymy with metaphor explains
whyDon’t shoot your mouth offmeans ‘Don’t say anything rash.’ A similar type
of analysis can be applied to other expressions regarding linguistic action, such
ascatch someone’s eye.
These analyses of the interaction of metaphor and metonymy in idiomatic
expressions for linguistic action illustrate how tropes are frequently combined
in different idiomatic expressions. I see this issue of trope interaction in idioms
to be one of the exciting avenues for future research.
Conclusion
In this chapter I have argued that we must recognize that many idioms are
analyzable with their components independently contributing to what these
phrases mean figuratively. The acquisition and comprehension of idioms are
based on compositional parsing strategies that are similar to those employed in
the comprehension of literal speech. Listeners and readers do not switch from a
literal to a nonliteral mode of processing when comprehending idioms. Instead,
they rely on a fast, unconscious process whereby they seek to discover the
independent meanings of the parts of idioms and combine these to recognize
what idioms mean as wholes. These meanings are not necessarily the literal
meanings of the words in idioms but, instead, may merely reflect figurative
interpretations of different words and word combinations in context. Our the-
oretical understanding of the idiom comprehension process will be limited
until we develop more sophisticated accounts of lexical semantics.
746 Raymond W. Gibbs Jr.