Cognitive Linguistic and Idioms General considerations about cognitive linguistics Cognitive linguistics is a new approach to the study of language which emerged in the late seventies and early eighties and interprets linguistic knowledge as part of general cognition and thinking. This new contemporary study that argues that language is governed by general cognitive principles, rather than by a special –purpose language module, is therefore associated with semantics, but is distinct from psycholinguistics, which draws upon empirical findings from cognitive psychology in order to explain the mental processes that underlie the acquisition and storage of speech.
The most influential linguists working along these lines and focusing on cognitive principles were Charles Fillmore, Wallace Chafe, George Lakoff, Dirk Geeraerts, Roland Langacker and Leonard Talmy. The most important assumption shared by all these researchers is that meaning is so central to language that it must be a primary focus of study. Linguistic structures serve the function of expressing meanings and thus, the mapping between meaning and form are a prime subject of linguistic analysis.
In The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, Dirk Geerates stated : “ Cognitive Linguistics is the study of language in its cognitive function, where cognitive refers to the crucial role of intermediate informational structures in our encounters with the world. Cognitive Linguistics is cognitive in the same way that cognitive psychology is: by assuming that our interaction with the world is mediated through informational structures in the mind. It is more specific than cognitive psychology, however, by focusing on natural language as a means for organizing, processing, and conveying that information. Language, then, is seen as a repository of world knowledge, a structured collection of meaningful categories that help us deal with new experiences and store information about the old one. Aspect of language and expression that had been consigned to the periphery of language, such as metaphor and metonymy, are redeemed and rehabilitated within Cognitive Linguistics. They are understood to be powerful conceptual mappings at the very core of human thought and in everyday speaking and thinking. Cognitive linguistics deny that the mind has any module for language-acquisition that is unique and autonomus. Important researchers in linguistics (Rosch 1973, Mervis and Rosch 1975) argued that features of language and our ability to learn and use them are accounted for by general cognitive abilities, our visual and sensimotor skills and our human categorization strategies, together with our cultural and functional parameters. The storage and retrieval of linguistic data is not significantly different from the storage and retrieval of other knowledge, and that use of language in understanding employs similar cognitive abilities to those used in other non-linguistic tasks. The most important keyword in Cognitive Linguistics is embodiment (Jhonson 1987, Lakoff 1987, Lakoff and Jhonson 1999). Cognitive linguistics seek to understand how memory, categorization and imagery affect language. It is believed that mental and linguistic categories are not abstract disembodied and human independent categories; we create them on the basis of our concrete experiences and under the constraints imposed by our bodies. Human conceptual categories, the meaning of words and sentences and the meaning of linguistic structures at any level are not a set of universal abstract features or uninterpreted symbols. They are motivated and grounded directly in experience, in our physical, social and cultural experiences.
Cognitive linguists study and theorize about the functional principles of linguistic organization. The cognitive abilities that organize language are not exclusive to language. These capacities include viewpoint, perspective, conceptual integration and analogy. Cognitive linguists focus on conceptual categories like: motion and location, force and causation ,entities and processes. Grammar is based on conceptual abilities, including the ability to look at a situation in abstract ways, understand the connections between different concepts and organize ideas on multiple levels. The idea that language and language production is a cognitive ability is a basic idea around which the field of cognitive linguistics is centered. Because important cognitive researchers see language as embedded in the overall cognitive capacities of man, topics of special interest for cognitive linguistics include: the structural characteristics of natural language categorization (such as systematic polysemy, prototypicality, cognitive models, mental imagery and metaphor ); the functional principles of linguistic organization; the conceptual interface between syntax and semantics (as explored by cognitive grammar); the experimental and pragmatic background of language-in-use and the relationship between language and thought. For many cognitive linguists, the main interest in Cognitive Linguistics lies in its provision of a better-grounded approach to and set of theoretical assumptions for syntactic and semantic theory than generative linguistics provides.
For others, however, an important starting point in cognitive research is represented by the opportunity to link the study of language and the mind to the study of the brain.

The cognitive approach of idioms

Idioms are characteristic of almost any language in the world and are frequently used in daily speech by natives. Traditionally, idioms are believed to be non-compositional. This means that the meaning of each constituent word from an idiom is unable to capture the overall meaning of that idiomatic expressio According to the cognitive view, many idioms are products of our conceptual system not simply a matter of language. There is a tendency among current approaches of idiomatic expressions to underline the idea that the relation between the idiomatic meaning and the linguistic form of most idioms is often not completely arbitrary. Nunberg claims that idiomaticity is a semantic rather than a syntactic phenomenon. He proposed a typology of idioms regarding their degree of compositionality.
Opaque idioms are those idiomatic expressions in which the constituent parts of the expression do not contribute to the idiomatic meaning, like in the well-known expression :kick the bucket. If the individual constituents in the string contribute to the figurative interpretation, the idiom is considered to be decomposable, exactly like in the expression “ spill the beans” (where ‘spill’ refers to the ‘act of revealing’ and ‘the bean’ emphasize the idea of a ‘secret’).
Gibbs and O’Brien (1990:37) try to infirm the traditional approaches according to which idioms are non-compositional expressions from semantic point of view. They claim that language use is constrained and motivated by pre-existing metaphorical schemas in people’s mind, which are grounded in their bodily experience. Native speakers prove a remarkable consistency concerning the mental images which underlie the idioms, sometimes different in form, but with similar figurative meaning.
Regarding to the cognitive perspective of idioms, idiomatic expressions cannot merely be described as lexical items. They seem to occupy a position between the productive and reproductive aspects of linguistic competence. Idiom variation is claimed to underline intelligent creative behaviour that exploits basic knowledge-resources and the information processing capacities of the human mind.
Phraseological researches have demonstrated that idioms show a greater degree of formal and semantic flexibility than was traditionally conceded. However we will speculate and discuss this aspect, the debate about the precise linguistic and mental quality of idioms is still undecided. Idioms are generally considered not to follow the principle of compositionality which suggest that “ […] the meaning of a complex expression is a function of the meaning of its constituent parts and the way these are syntactically combined”(van der Linden, 1993:2).
Gibbs (1994:273) argues that the reason why idioms are often considered to be “ dead metaphors” is given by the confusion that linguists usually makes between dead metaphors and conventional ones. Because people generally have little knowledge of the original metaphorical roots of an idiom (for example “ “to be soft hearted” ) , it is believed that the comprehension of idioms is the same as knowing the meaning of individual words, which is based on convention.
Almost in the same way that literal and other figurative aspects of language ( e.g. metonymy or metaphor) are comprehended, the compositional approach to idioms representation is based on the idea that idiomatic meanings are simultaneously composed and processing out of literal word meanings and the specific interpretation of these word meanings within a particular context. Kovecses and Szabo (1996:338) consider that metonymy involves a stand for conceptual relationship between two entities within a single domain, while metaphor is understood as a relationship between two conceptual domains such as anger and fire. They suggested that the meaning of many idioms depends on the following factors: * source-target relationship which determines the general meaning idioms; * systematic mappings between the source and target domains which provide more specific meaning of idioms; * particular knowledge structures of inferences associated with the source domain, i.e the general knowledge of the world; * cognitive mechanisms such as metaphor and metonymy;
Language is perceived as a continuum from simple to more complex units and not as grammar dichotomy. In cognitive semantics, it has been considered that many figurative expressions such as idioms are motivated rather than arbitrary. In others words, while their figurative meaning cannot be completely predictable from literal meanings of their parts, the connection between their figurative and literal meanings may be possible.
Traditional methods of teaching and learning idioms focus on memorization. Such rigid process can be time and effort –consuming as learners picked up discretely without associations between forms and meanings. To bridge the methodological gaps, an alternative method which integrates metaphoric mappings in the learning process had been proposed among the time. Many linguists believe that the metaphoric mappings build correspondences between source and target concepts of idioms and thus facilitate english foreign learners to understand the motivations.
According to Kövecses (2002), when an idiomatic expression is motivated by metaphor, the more general meaning of the string is based on the target domain that is applicable to the idiom in question. Regarding the comprehension of idioms, two basic theoretical approaches have been proposed: one interpretation refers to the lexical representation hypothesis , which suggests that they are mentally represented and processed as lexical items, the idiomatic phrase being just a large word-like unit. An alternative interpretation is expressed by the configurational hypothesis which claims that idioms may be mentally represented or processed not as words, but as configurations of words whose meaning become activated whenever “ sufficient input has rendered the configurations recognizable” (Papagno & Vallar, 2000, p.516). Gibbs and O’Brian (1990, p. 147) assumed that the consistency of the idiom images is due to the “ constraining influence of conceptual metaphors” according to which the underlying nature of our thought process is metaphorical.
In other words, people use metaphor to make sense of our experience. Consequently when the speakers of a language come across a verbal metaphor the corresponding conceptual metaphor will be automatically activated.
Opaque idioms should be considered as special cases of idiomatic expressions which assimilate to individual words in the sense that their syntactic properties and meanings are exclusively related to the form that comprise them. However, this view should be restricted to a limited number of idioms. Another group of idioms is made up of idioms whose parts convey information that can be interpreted in one way or another with the aid of cognitive operations, but may still be learned as a whole. A representative example for this situation can be “spill the beans” . This expression is too much conventionalized, and its meaning cannot be recovered from the literal interpretation of its constituents. Somehow , contrary to the expectations, metaphorical correspondences can be established between “spill “ and “reveal” , and between “ beans” and “ secrets” and in one way or another the individual components of the expression aid in the overall interpretation , but the structure of the expression can be altered in some contexts and for several purpose. For example, someone who is aware of the fact that s/he should have not revealed certain information and who intends to apologize in an informal way may say : “Ooops , I may have spilled some of the beans!”. Nevertheless, it is not clear whether speakers of a language have access to this interpretation on the basis of a direct form-meaning connection or by taking into account the individual parts of the idiom.
According to the Idiom Decomposition Hypothesis (Gibbs, 1990), idiomatic expressions are represented in the mental lexicon in different ways depending on the semantic analysability of its individual components. If we assume that idioms have only one semantic representation, there is no way of explaining the syntactic flexibility of some groups of idioms. The model mentioned above claims that speakers analyse idioms from a compositional perspective because they acknowledge the metaphoric mapping from a source to a target domain.

Idioms based on Metaphor In contradiction with non-compositional idioms, decomposable idioms are able to undergo certain syntactic operations that lead us to the conclusion that “ pieces of an idiom typically have identifiable meanings which combine to produce the meaning of the whole:. (Wasow,1982).-parising decomposable idioms.
Reccent researches in the field of cognitive linguistics have shown that the meaning of an idiom is not arbitrary, as the meaning of a word is, and its overall meaning can be derived from the meaning of its components. People should have strong conventional images for many idiomatic strings. Their figurative meanings can be very well motivated by people’s conceptual knowledge that has a metaphoric basis. There are many differences in the processing of literal and idiomatic expressions, because of the metaphoric nature of idioms. During the processing and comprehension of idioms, people’s assumptions about the way in which the individual components of this idiomatic strings refers to the metaphorical concepts underlying their figurative referents, differ greatly from the perceptions obtained when literal language is used. For example, the idiomatic expression Ann spilled the beans, maps the speaker’s knowledge of someone’s tipping over a container of beans- the source domain- into a person revealing a secret- the target domain. For native speakers “spill the beans” means ‘reveal a secret’ because there are underlying conceptual metaphors, such as THE MIND IS A CONTAINER, and IDEAS ARE PHYSICAL ENTITIES, that structure their conceptions of minds, secrets and disclosure (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) . Linguists have proved that idiomatic strings do not exist as separate semantic units within the lexicon, they are actually conventional expressions which reflect coherent systems of metaphorical concepts. Metaphor and metonymy, are considered to be in the last twenty years, as mechanisms that relate a domain(or domanins) of knowledge to an idiomatic meaning in an indirect way. Conceptual metaphors bring two domains of knowledge into a direct relationship of correspondence. One is a familiar physical domain and the other is less familiar, an abstract domain. Emotion concepts and concepts denoting personal relationship are normally susceptible to metaphorical understanding. There are more than one hundred emotion idioms in English, used to express anger.
For example, in the expression “spit fire” , the domain of fire is used to understand the domain of anger , or, in other words, anger is comprehended throw the concept of fire. Thus, we can call the ANGER IS FIRE conceptual metaphor (where the capital letters indicate concepts rather than words). In the case of the sentence “The fire between them finally went out”, the conceptual metaphor underlying the idiom LOVE IS FIRE, or in “The painting set fire to the composer’s imagination” , the IMAGINATION IS FIRE.
Now we are in the position to provide a specific illustration for the idiomatic expression “ to spit fire” used above, illustration which emphasize the conceptual motivation for this idiom. Special idiomatic meaning | ‘ be very angry’ | Cognitive mechanism | Metaphor : “anger is fire” | | | | | | |