[...]... use and in comprehension Even though there is no apparent relation between the meanings of the words kick and bucket and the concept "to die," word meanings and idiomatic meaning may still interact to guide and constrain this idiom's use On the one hand, our understanding of what it means to die guides and constrains how the idiom kick the bucket 8 GLUCKSBERG may be used People can die silently, and. .. is dedicated to the interpretation of idioms and to the relations between their literal and the figurative meanings Glucksberg's claim is that idioms are not unanalyzable wholes, but can be decomposed into linguistic and conceptual elements, even though the literal meanings of the linguistic elements alone are insufficient, and other sources of meaning-in particular, stipulated and allusional-must... of course, proceeds as part of linguistic processing, and lexicalized phrases such as by and large or kick the bucket are routinely found in the mental lexicon along with their constituent words, by, and, large, and so on Which of the two meanings-literal or idiomatic-is apprehended first depends on the relative speed with which full linguistic processing and lexical/idiom access can be completed Normally,... involved in their comprehension, how can their syntactic behavior be explained, and what is their place in our languages This approach is grounded in the conviction that problems of representation, parsing and interpretation are different for metaphors and idioms, each of which has specific properties and characteristics, and requires, therefore, different explanations This is not to deny the unquestionable... an idioms' elements and the idiom meaning are not apparent, but the meanings of individual words nevertheless can constrain both interpretation and use For the idiom kick the bucket, for example, the semantics of the verb to kick constrain both interpretation and discourse productivity (see aforementioned examples) Such idioms were dubbed compositional-opaque (Type CO) by Cacciari and Glucksberg (1991).3... abnormally decomposable idioms of Nunberg's (1978) and Gibbs, Nayak, and Cutting's (1989) classification According to Gibbs, Nayak, and Cutting, normally decomposable idioms have quasi-literal relations between elements and meanings, as in pop the question, whereas in abnormally decomposable idioms these relations are more 3 Cacciari and Glucksberg (1991) and others have used the term analyzable instead... which the ability to comprehend and produce idioms grows in parallel with the child's increasing mastery of linguistic and communicative abilities Botelho and Cutler's chapter presents data on memory for Portuguese idioms with and without a literal counterpart The authors argue that their results support the lexical representation hypothesis originallyy proposed by Cutler and Swinney in 1979), one of... the syntactic analysis of an idiom is computed even when such an analysis is no longer used to contruct the literal interpretation of the string In Part 111, the chapter by Stock, Slack, and Ortony and that by Pulman both tackle one of the best known and least understood problems involving idioms: their flexibility As Pulman correctly points out, the major difficulty with idioms is not "that their meaning... bucket." On the other hand, the meanings of the words kick and bucket can also play important roles Kicking is a discrete act, and so, even though one can say, "He lay dying all week," one cannot say, "He lay kicking the bucket all week" (Wasow, Sag, & Nunberg, 1983) This is because the only way one can kick a bucket all week is to kick it over and over again, but one cannot die over and over again How... least two interesting advantages over the standard idiom look-up model First, it allows for rapid and easy comprehension and production of variant idioms Second, it is parsimonious in that the same model would account for both conventional and variant idiom processing The PIP model can be tested by assessing the relative comprehension time for variant idioms and comparable literal expressions According . class="bi x0 y0 w1 h1" alt="" IDIOMS: Processing, Structure, and Interpretation IDIOMS: Processing, Structure, and Interpretation Edited by Cristina. Cataloging-in-Publication Data Idioms: processing, structure, and interpretation / edited by Cristina Cacciari and Patrizia Tabossi. p. cm. Includes