My main aim in this chapter has been to demonstrate how people’s preexist-
ing metaphorical understanding of many basic concepts partly motivates what
people see as the figurative meanings of idioms and their components. This
metaphorical knowledge influences the linguistic behavior of idioms as well
as the learning, understanding, and real-time processing of idioms. Idiom re-
searchers must be able to incorporate these data in their accounts of different
aspects of idiomaticity. Idiom researchers must also begin to explicitly recog-
nize the difference between dead metaphors and conventional metaphors that
reflect ordinary patterns of human conceptual structure. These conventional
metaphoric, and to some extent metonymic, mappings not only motivate the
meanings of idiomatic phrases, but also explain our creation and use of many
conventional and, to some observers, literal expressions, such asI exploded with
anger, which is motivated by the same metaphor of ANGER IS HEATED FLUID
IN A CONTAINER as isblow your stack, flip your lid,andhit the ceiling.These
same underlying conceptual metaphors are also elaborated on in novel lin-
guistic metaphors such as those found in poetry (Gibbs & Nascimento 1994;
Lakoff & Turner 1989). In general, then, idiomatic phrases do not arise from
some unique linguistic and conceptual knowledge; instead they reflect ordi-
nary, figurative patterns of human understanding.
Several linguists and psychologists have argued with the foregoing con-
clusions about the conceptual basis of idiomaticity. Psycholinguists have sug-
gested that idioms do not reflect much about human conceptual structure
(Keysar & Bly 1999; Ortony 1988) or, at the very least, are not used in people’s
ordinary comprehension of idiomatic phrases (Glucksberg, Brown, & McGlone
1993). Several scholars have argued that the conceptual view of idiomaticity
advocated here fails to acknowledge the importance of lexical information in
idiomatic meaning (Kreuz & Graesser 1991; Stock, Slack, & Ortony 1993; and
see Gibbs & Nayak 1991).
Yet the conceptual view claims only that conceptual metaphors provide
part of the link between idiomatic phrases and their overall figurative inter-
pretations. The meanings of an idiom’s components (and again, what these
meanings are needs to be better understood) contribute significantly to idiom
meanings. But lexical meanings do not by themselves capture the complex
inferences associated with idiomatic meanings; this is one reason why concep-
tual metaphors are an essential part of a theory of idiomaticity. Such a theory can
certainly provide some motivated reasons that link idioms to their figurative
interpretations. These motivations are directly tied to the ways that people or-
dinarily think about the concepts to which idioms refer and suggest that people
actually conceptualize much of their everyday experience in figurative terms.
We should recognize that many idioms are partly motivated by figures of
thought that make up a significant part of our ordinary conceptual structures.
References
Bolinger, D. (1971)The Phrasal Verb in English, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Cacciari, C. (1993) ‘‘The Place of Idioms in a Literal and Metaphorical World,’’ in C. Cacciari and
P. Tabossi, eds.,Idioms :Processing, Structure, and Interpretation, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,
Hillsdale, New Jersey.
Cacciari, C., and S. Glucksberg (1990) ‘‘Understanding Idiomatic Expressions: The Contribution of
Word Meanings,’’ in G. Simpson, ed.,Understanding Word and Sentence,Elsevier, Amsterdam.
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