Esa Penttilä

Idiomatic proclivity and literality of meaning in body-part nouns: Corpus studies of English, German, Swedish, Russian and Finnish

Study 1, a dictionary analysis of English, German, Swedish, Russian and Finnish VP idioms, shows that there is a general trend for these idioms to pick their nouns from among the most frequent body-part nouns. Thus, the same overall cognitive domains tend to be favored in the lexical resources for idiomatic and nonidiomatic language. In Study 2 we used corpora to test the degree of literal versus non-literal use, in terms of textual frequency, of the three most idiom-prone nouns in the five languages, viz., ‘hand’, ‘head’ and ‘eye’. Moreover, as text genres are expected to differ in their use of literal versus non-literal senses of words, two text types were pitted against each other, viz., fiction and newspaper language, entertaining the hypothesis that fiction would be more non-literal than newspaper texts. The reverse turned out to be the case. We explain the higher degree of nonliteral (mostly metaphorical) use of ‘hand’, ‘head’ and ‘eye’ with the notion that in fiction the authors describe a world constructed in situ, while newspaper writers interpret the world already shared by them and their readers.