Characterizing Idioms: Conventionality and Contingency

Michaela Socolof, Jackie Cheung, Michael Wagner, Timothy O’Donnell


Abstract
Idioms are unlike most phrases in two important ways. First, words in an idiom have non-canonical meanings. Second, the non-canonical meanings of words in an idiom are contingent on the presence of other words in the idiom. Linguistic theories differ on whether these properties depend on one another, as well as whether special theoretical machinery is needed to accommodate idioms. We define two measures that correspond to the properties above, and we show that idioms fall at the expected intersection of the two dimensions, but that the dimensions themselves are not correlated. Our results suggest that introducing special machinery to handle idioms may not be warranted.
Anthology ID:
2022.acl-long.278
Volume:
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4024–4037
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.278
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.278
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Michaela Socolof, Jackie Cheung, Michael Wagner, and Timothy O’Donnell. 2022. Characterizing Idioms: Conventionality and Contingency. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 4024–4037, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Characterizing Idioms: Conventionality and Contingency (Socolof et al., ACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.278.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.278.mp4