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Abstract
PUs are known as complicated language units with endlessly varied manifestations in discourse. This calls for a systematic view of their actual use to gain a better insight into the discoursal dimension of text. The identification process needs, first and foremost, a profound understanding of the base form as an element of the system of language and its realization in discourse in either its core use or its instantial use.
References
No established term exists for this form in English, as it is not singled out as a separate entity in contrast to discoursal forms. The usual term used in Russian is ishodnaya forma, meaning “the initial form”. It was introduced by Kunin (see 1964, 1970). Sabban uses the term Grundform (basic form) in German (see Sabban 1998b, 1999).
For the formation of phraseological meaning and types of phraseological abstraction, see Melerovich (1982); Dobrovol’skij (1998).
For the concept of cohesion see Halliday and Hasan (1976:Ch. 1). For semantic and stylistic cohesion in PUs, see Ch. 3.1 of this work.
According to Halliday and Hasan a tie is the occurrence of a pair of cohesively related items (1976: 3).
To understand more about the mental lexicon and the processes in which human language is learned, produced, and processed, see Kess (1992:Ch. 3–4); Aitchison (2003). Moon reports some of the findings of psycholinguistic research in fixed expressions and idioms. Although some of the results are hypothetical and even contradictory, research in language acquisition suggests that language is learned, stored, retrieved, and produced in holophrases and other multi-word items, not just as individual words or terms (Moon 1998:Ch. 2).
See Eysenck for an account of the workings of long-term memory (1993:Ch. 4). For types of memory, see also Reber ([1985] 1995: 446–449).
See the analysis of Shakespeare’s stylistic use of this PU in Ch. 5.4
Numerous studies have investigated the standard form and meaning of PUs. See the study of idioms in, for example, Häusermann (1977); Makkai (1978); Fernando and Flavell (1981); Strässler (1982); Moon (1988, 1992); Fernando (1996); Moon (1998). Fernando and Flavell extensively study the formation and nature of idioms. Strässler offers a pragmatic analysis and views idiomaticity as a cross-cultural phenomenon of language in use. Phraseology received much attention and was investigated on a wide scale in the former Soviet Union; see, for example, the works of Kunin and his followers (Kunin 1970). Core use of idioms in spoken discourse has been examined by McCarthy (1998:Ch. 7). Many articles explore various aspects of standard form and use of PUs in Granger and Meunier ([2008] 2009b).
The term prescriptive use, which was suggested by Kunin in English, does not seem to meet the needs, as in traditional grammar the aim of prescription is to describe the language not as it is used, but as it is thought the language ought to be used, even condemning certain usages (Baugh and Cable [1951] 2001:273–275; Wales [1989] 1995:317–318). Prescription is also defined as an authoritarian statement about the correctness of a particular use of a language (Crystal [1987] 1995:428). The term introduced by Kunin in Russian is uzual’noye upotrebleniye (“usual use”).
For instance, to have a bird’s-eye view; a nine-day wonder.
By style of the base form I understand the set of distinctive stylistic features characteristic of the PU. See Wales ([1989] 1995: 371).
It is not my aim to study the stylistic features of the base form and core use in more detail, as it is a special area of research in its own right.
For the intricate interaction of metaphor and metonymy, see, for example, Lakoff and Turner (1989: 100–106); Gibbs ([1994] 1999: 319–358, 2007: 19–31); Barcelona (1998, 2000a: 31–144); Steen (2005). Over the past decade metonymy has received sustained attention in cognitive research. “It is impossible to study metaphor without addressing metonymy” (Forceville and Urios-Aparisi 2009a: 12).
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