idiom analyzability and variation

1

Fulbright Grant 2007-2008

Idiom Analyzability and Variation

Attila Cserép

University of Debrecen Rice University

4032 Debrecen, Egyetem tér 1., Hungary 6100 Main St., Houston, TX 77005 L

http://ieas.unideb.hu/ http://www.rice.edu/

[email protected] Adviser: Suzanne Kemmer

I spent six months as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Rice University, Houston, TX from January till June 2008. I worked in the Digital

Media Center and used a concordancing tool to search for idiom variants in a huge collection (350 million words) of electronically stored texts coming from American newspapers. In addition to the

academic experience, I had a share of southern and western spirit, as I met the multicultural and multiethnic US.

2

Idiom Analyzability and Variation – Attila Cserép

1. Getting settled

I remember I was in a hurry to catch the transatlantic flight in London and finally made it. My baggage didn’t, but I wasn’t aware of it until after my arrival. The flight was long and tiring, and after I arrived in Houston I went through the airport procedures. My photo and fingerprint taken, I headed for baggage claim only to find I had no baggage to claim (“Houston, I have a problem”).1 After some time they managed to trace it and said it was on its way from London, so I took a taxi to get to my apartment. The view from the car was somehow familiar. Had I seen this before? Were the meetings and booklets of the Hungarian-American Fulbright Commission so successful in preparing me that I wasn’t supposed to experience any culture shock? The meetings, brochures and get-togethers were really useful as we were supplied with plenty of useful info, tips and advice about what to do and how to do it. But the feeling of familiarity was probably a “media effect”, I had seen similar images in American films.

My American contact person, Suzanne Kemmer, had helped me find a nice apartment not far from campus. I had spent a lot of time in Hungary searching online for accommodation, but Suzanne’s help was much appreciated. As I can’t drive, it was important to me to find a place close to campus. Texas is said to be relatively cheap, yet some areas are rather expensive by southern standards. Most one-bedroom furnished apartments were offered at around $900-1000 per month in the university area. It was a 30-minute walk from the apartment to the university, about 15 minutes by bike.

1 The actual sentence that one of the Apollo 13 astronauts uttered was “Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here” and a few seconds later another one added “Houston, we’ve had a problem” (http://history.nasa.gov/Timeline/apollo13chron.html), but these utterances are usually (mis)quoted as “Houston, we have a problem”.

I have to go back in time a couple of years at this point. It was then that I met David Vanderwerken, who arrived in Debrecen, my hometown, as a Fulbright professor to teach American literature. We shared an office and that set us on a course towards friendship. I soon came to like David and his wife, Karen, who have been very good friends of mine ever since. David talked to me about the Fulbright grant and I feel gratitude toward him for bringing this to my attention. I hoped I would meet my American friends again in the US, and the big moment arrived shortly after I arrived. David and Karen live in Fort Worth, TX, which is not far from Houston by US standards, and they visited me at the very beginning of my stay. We were filled with joy to see each other and I was supplied with my “survival kit”.

The university campus looked nice with beautiful modern buildings, a lot of green areas, a big stadium and huge parking lots. There were a large number of trees around, which is very important in Texas. Ice and trees all serve the same purpose of cooling you down, and there was plenty of shade under the trees. Unfortunately, the shade cannot protect from the humidity, which was bearable until March, but from about April on it was the combination of heat and humidity that posed a serious challenge. I had never seen special cool-down rooms before, they were set up in May for the commencement ceremony. No wonder Houston is said to be the most air-conditioned city in the world. As long as you stayed inside, you were all right. In fact, I never understood what drove all those people to jog around the campus in the heat of the day. Fitness and health are important, but was it really a clever idea to schedule your daily exercise for the hottest hours? Joggers were to be seen not only early in the morning or after sunset, which was one of the mysteries of Houston.

Picture 1. How to speak Texan

3


2. Research summary2.1 Corpus searches

My research involved searching through hundreds of millions of words to find English idiomatic expressions (rock the boat, chew the fat, etc.) and record all the variant forms. One of the purposes of this was to see the extent of idiom flexibility in a large amount of naturally occurring language. Another of my aim was to discover how this flexibility is related to the meaning structure of idioms. Idioms were thought to be fixed in the past, but the computer has enabled researchers to study far more examples than before and the first studies showed that these expressions are to some extent variable and infrequent. So far idioms have been examined in text collections (corpora) of 100 million words or less, but their infrequency means that larger corpora are necessary. I examined a total of twenty-four different idioms in a 350-million-word corpus called “North American News Text Corpus”. The texts were stored on two CDs in the Digital Media Center (DMC), which was where I spent most of my research time. The Center looked like a spacious computer room, with plenty of space between the computers (workstations). The circumstances were ideal for fruitful scholarly activity: long opening hours, the staff’s expertise and helpfulness all contributed to the favorable circumstances.

I needed a special software, a concordancer, to search the texts. The Linguistics Department had a concordancer and I had taken mine from home, but neither worked well. I ran several test queries, and finally I decided to upgrade my software, so that the new version was capable of processing the data. The software I used was unfamiliar to the faculty at Rice, and I gave a talk about it as part of the department’s colloquium series. The tool that I used is actually more than a simple concordancer, it is an integrated suite of computer programs called WordSmith. It is capable of searching for a word or set of word forms in the co-text of another word or set of word forms, and the distance between the two words can be specified by the user. To find examples of rock the boat, I searched for rock/rocks/rocked, etc. within ten words of boat/boats. The software performed the searches, what was left was to go through the hits manually, because the search results contained a lot of irrelevant hits. These had to be deleted and the relevant hits had to be checked for any type of variation, and these variations were then recorded and classified. See Picture 2 for a screenshot of what I had at the end of this process and Figure 1 for the first twenty lines.

Picture 2. Concordance lines for rock the boat

4


1 nal trim) Because Gingrich has always been a boat -rocker, many of his closest friends and advi

2 may succeed. Mr. Starr is in fact anything but a boat -rocker, but rather an establishment figure a

3 . And if the corporation is based in Germany, a boat rocker better know how to swim. So when Ge

4 li official close to the talks. ``We’re stuck in a boat together, and if either one rocks it, we sin

5 ENERGETIC TRUSTBUSTER, BUT NOT A BOAT ROCKER &LR; &QL; (ART ADV: Photo of

6 must first wrestle a few questions: Is picking a boat -rocker the best way to lead the military ser

7 kind of American police chief: risk takers and boat rockers ... (he) is one of numerous standout

8 ernational: Economy Minister Rocks Argentine boat --- Cavallo Unnerves Markets, Congress With

9 st nothing, and promised not to rock the British boat , Jospin says he will create 700,000 jobs, cu

10 cattle prods? Ah, well. Better not rock China’s boat . Mustn’t jeopardize access to that lucrative

11 ington goes to every length not to rock China’s boat , Beijing resorts to tantrums and insults whe

12 ntal China policy of the West: rock no Chinese boat lest Beijing throw easy Western access to th

13 ats because we don’t want to rock the company boat . We think filing a complaint will lead to re

14 t not capsize, Mexico’s storm-tossed economic boat . Whether the next generation of leaders will

15 ispute ``is threatening to rock the United Front boat .’’ Deve Gowda, who was Karnataka chief mini

16 Appointees Not Expected to Rock Greenspan’s boat (Washn) &QL; WASHINGTON &MD; Alice

17 llied, they are not expected to rock Greenspan’s boat . ``They will be supportive of Fed efforts to

18 ical, saying it would rock Oracle’s very healthy boat . ``There are other less expensive and less d

19 rs. ENTERTAINMENT Rocking Hollywood’s boat Think of Hollywood as a huge rowboat, mana

20 mping around rocks the mutual-fund industry’s boat . Funds were built on the premise that an inv

Figure 1. The first twenty concordance lines for rock the boat

A number of methodological issues arose as I went through the material. The texts contained a large amount of overlap between sentences, because the material came from newswire transmissions, sometimes several transmissions related to one and the same event considered newsworthy. Many sentences were modified to some extent, and the inclusion of these partly repeated chunks of text would have skewed the quantitative investigation. A cut-off point had to be set to delete lines with major overlaps: sentences with 80 per cent or more overlap were ignored.

I also had to determine whether words preceding and following the idiomatic expression were part of the idiom or occurred outside the expression. This sounds simple, but consider the examples below:

(1)The new push on Bosnia authorized by Clinton earlier this month appears to have made little early headway on the war crimes issue.

(2)But there are changes that cause big waves and may even rock the boat.

The words little and early are clearly part of the idiom make headway in (1), and the phrase on the war crimes issue could also be viewed as such, since it belongs to the noun, just as towards democracy can be seen as belonging to progress in The party called for further progress towards democracy (the example is from the online Macmillan Dictionary). At the same time, on the war crimes issue is not unlike an expression of place used figuratively, equivalent to ‘in the field of war crimes’, and so it could be regarded as an adverbial that combines with a separate idiom. The preposition and the words that follow all influence our choice. In Dole made headway in recent days the prepositional phrase in recent days is not part of the idiom, while in Ronald Reagan made substantial headway toward nuclear arms reductions with the Soviet Union the prepositional phrase toward nuclear arms reductions is more integrated into the idiom. In (2), even could be regarded as inside or outside the idiom rock the boat, depending on whether it modifies only the noun boat or the whole expression rock the boat.

There are two different ways of measuring variability. The simplest measure is to calculate the proportion of variant tokens of an idiom to all the tokens of the same

5


idiom. An alternative is to calculate the average variability of an idiom by counting all the variations and dividing this by the number of all occurrences. Since a particular example sometimes exhibits two or more variations compared to the base form, sometimes only one variation, the two measures of flexibility yield different results. For example, there are 229 examples of rock the boat, of which 65 (28.38%) contain variation. But there are 86 variations in the 229 examples, giving an average variability of 37.55. Below is an example which contains three variations: use of the word any, pluralization of boat, and insertion of the of prepositional phrase.

(3)“But Farrakhan,” Reed said, “is not really rocking any boats of the white elite.”

After calculating the variability of each idiom, I compared this to the decomposability of the same expression. By decomposability is meant the potential of the idiom components to have meanings when combined with the rest of the idiom constituents. For example, rock the boat could be analyzed as rock meaning something like ‘disturb’ and the boat meaning ‘the stable situation’. Other idioms cannot be similarly decomposed, such as buy the farm ‘die’. It is assumed that there is a third group of expressions, those that usually permit no decomposition, but can in some contexts be viewed as decomposable, such as grease the wheels (Langlotz 2006). On the whole, flexibility closely correlates with decomposability, but completely nondecomposable expressions can occasionally vary. Adjectives and nouns are very commonly inserted before the noun of the idiom, even when this noun has no figurative meaning within the expression.

2.2 LibraryThe library building was just a stone’s throw away. Fondren library was very impressive. It had a marvelous linguistics collection, which was a treasure trove for someone like me. I first used the electronic catalog to find books of interest and then browsed through the books which were located in the same section. This proved to be a good tactic, and I discovered several useful books. One of the advantages of the library was that the scholarly journals were stored on open shelves in the same way as the books. Study rooms and reading areas on each floor gave visitors the chance to delve into their books. Photocopiers were also available, so that I could copy articles without having to leave the building.

At the time of writing this paper, I am teaching an MA course that explores the relationship between language and ideology with the title “Metaphor and ideology in America”. The readings in this course are based on material that I gathered in the library, and I am sure that access to the rich collection of Fondren library greatly facilitated the planning of my course.

2.3 SurveyI prepared two online questionnaires to test native

speaker intuition about idioms using the site SurveyMonkey. The website allows a flexible survey design, so that I prepared two different surveys. One of 106 items with open-ended questions asking subjects to provide the meaning for the verb and the noun in 53 idioms taken from previous psycholinguistic studies by Gibbs and his co-researchers (Gibbs and Nayak 1989, Gibbs et al 1989, Hamblin and Gibbs 1999). Another one of 96 multiple-choice items asking subjects to provide the meaning for verbs, nouns, prepositional phrases and fragmentary word sequences. Data analysis is still in progress.

3. Social and cultural activities on campus

They say travel broadens the mind, and the Fulbright Program gave me the chance to meet people with diverse cultural backgrounds. I enjoyed the multi-ethnic salad bowl. I met international students at various events such as the Culture Fair or the annual Rice Powwow. The Culture Fair was an entertaining way of getting to know foreign students and their homelands. Each country that was represented at the fair had a stand where you could take funny quizzes consisting of geographical, historical and cultural questions about the given country. The students, dressed in national costumes, offered national food, brochures and pictures, and you could take part in national games or typical activities associated with the country. It was a colorful event that served the purpose of raising cultural awareness, not only awareness of other cultures, but also awareness of your own cultural background.

My Fulbright time coincided with the first stage of the 2008 US elections, with the caucuses and primaries under way and the potential party candidates battling it out. The OISS (Office of International Students and Scholars) offered a lecture about the presidential election system primarily to international faculty and students and I used this opportunity to have a grasp of the complicated election process. Since one of the aims of the Fulbright program is to promote mutual understanding, the OISS’s initiative to encourage internationals to describe the election processes of their homelands as part of the VIP (Valuable International Perspectives) program gave me the chance to act as a “cultural ambassador”. My contribution, Hungary’s Election Process, is available online at http://oiss.rice.edu/content.aspx?id=116.

4. Experiencing the South and the West

A number of signs reminded me that this was the south of the US, Texas. For example, two cowboys in a playground preparing for a showdown (see Picture 3), the ubiquitous Spanish language (Habla anyone Inglés around here?) or the rodeo.

6


Just as the powwow can be viewed as the celebration of Native American past, the rodeo is a celebration of the cowboys of the Wild West. Actually, it is an interesting blend of past tradition and modern show. The parade proper involved a march of cowboys, brass bands and floats in the streets of downtown Houston. Tradition and western spirit is re-lived by trail riders who leave their cars behind, get on their horses and ride to Houston at around this time. I also had a share of western spirit in Fort Worth, which is said to be located where the West begins. I saw a small western town as I walked in the stockyards area and I could feel the western spirit in the bars and during the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo with its events of bull riding, bronc riding, barrel racing and team roping. It was a contest between beast and man, instinct versus human reflex. The great star of the show was – you would never guess – a monkey called “Whiplash”, dressed in cowboy wear, riding on a small dog and chasing sheep. Hungary also has her “cowboys” in Hortobágy, who herd gray cattle called “Szürkemarha”. To the city folk, the Texas Longhorn is not very different, both species have big long horns.

Can you experience the US without a car? Was I adventurous by going to a country of car culture without a driver’s license? I did well without a car, but I spent only 6 months in the US. A longer stay would have meant more sacrifice on my part. My adviser, Suzanne, had a spare bike that she lent me, and that was my major means of transport. I did my weekly shopping by riding my bike to the supermarket. I must have looked odd on my way back, as I was trying to keep my balance, with large plastic bags hanging on the handlebar. I wonder what the people in their cars thought.

I also rode my bike to visit Houston’s sights, which meant that I picked my destinations partly on the basis of distance. The Space Center was located outside what was doable by bike, but Suzanne kindly offered me a ride. It was in the Space Center that I touched moon rock for the first time in my life. To the touch, it felt like just another piece of rock,

but it came from the Moon. I didn’t get to see the current Mission Control Center, instead I saw an old version which was in operation during the early space programs in the 60s and 70s. It was amazing to see how technology had evolved. Space exploration makes great demands on experts, and a look at the old gadgets convinced you that it made even greater demands in the past. How could they manage?

The only time when Americans walk is when they walk their dogs. If you see someone walking on the street, it’s a safe bet that they are tourists. All right, this may be a bit of an exaggeration, but compared to Europe, the US is definitely a car culture. I often saw people who were talking to bank tellers over a phone system while sitting in their car and receiving or sending bank documents over pneumatic tubes. Drive-thrus and drive-up windows are very common, still I wouldn’t have imagined I would find a drive-up window at a pharmacy. Americans’ love for their cars has found a unique expression in the Art Car Parade, held annually in Houston. I watched, sometimes in disbelief, as the cars rolled by. These mobile artworks were products of the imagination, some cars had beautiful paintings on their bodies, other cars were more radically transformed. An example of the latter can be seen below.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of American culture were the signs. Not the traffic signs. I have in mind those public notices that I saw in various places. They warned or simply informed the public and I had been unaware of how funny they could be. I guess I found many of them funny because, being a linguist, I think language is fun. A notice on a restroom door said “BABY CHANGING STATION” (What? You can actually alter your baby?), a traffic sign read “WRONG WAY” (How does it know where I am heading?), a solitary sign in a grassy field surrounded by shrubs and trees said “WILDFLOWERS GROWING!!” (Am I supposed to watch out? Brace myself for attack?), a notice on the window inside a shuttle bus advised me to sit gently “CAUTION: SIT GENTLY” (OK. I promise I will not be violent when I sit down). Another reason why they

Picture 3. A Texas playground Picture 4. The cowboy monkey as shown in a leaflet

7


were funny was that I lacked the background knowledge to interpret them correctly. The “wildflowers” sign wanted to say something like ‘Don’t worry if you see tall grass here, it has not been cut on purpose to allow the wildflowers to grow. The “sit gently” message was placed above some tip-up bus seats whose seat cushions sprang back to their normal upright position when released. The notice in the picture below, which I found beneath an overpass, is addressed primarily to homeless people.

I made new friends and visited old ones. I met a nice middle-aged couple at the beginning of my stay: Mary Louise and Rudy. We were on the same wavelength right from the start and I made friends with them. We often had lunch together on the weekend at our regular place, Collina’s, an Italian café which also served pizza, Mary Louise’s favorite. I liked Mary Louise and Rudy because they had a good sense of humor, and we had a good time together. Rudy was originally from Switzerland and I enjoyed the occasional German expressions. I also met Mary and Don, David and Carol’s friends, who were so kinds as to spend some of their time with me. I had many good laughs with Mary.

I’ll be forever thankful for David and Karen’s warm welcome and generous hospitality. They gave me wonderful educational, cultural and entertainment treats. One of those special treats was a lavish reception given by Texas Christian University (TCU), where David teaches. Musical performances by TCU students and talks were followed by the reception under a huge air-conditioned tent, where you could engage in conversation, taste seafood and dance to music provided by TCU’s brass band.

My sport experience mainly consisted of watching ice hockey on TV, but I was also taken to a ballpark. TCU Horned Frogs beat the Air Force, and it seemed to me that I cheered and applauded at the right moments (the result of having studied baseball rules beforehand). If you know the rules, you can enjoy the game. Erik, David and Karen’s

younger son, a true baseball fan and a nice communicative guy, joined us for the game.

It was in the mid-90s that I first met Davis D. Joyce and his wife, Carol. Davis taught US history as a Soros professor at the University of Debrecen from 1994 to 1996, and I came to like him. Our shared interest in handball (then new to Davis) helped forge a friendship. I think the best way to describe him is to say that he is an Oklahoma and baseball fan (not sure which is first, Oklahoma or baseball). Oklahoma had evoked in me images of red dirt before, of which I saw a lot as we drove from one place to another, but I had never formed an association between the Sooner State and Plains Indians or oil.

I vaguely remember watching the news footage in horror after the 1995 suicide bomb attack in Oklahoma city. After 9/11, memorials such as the Oklahoma National Memorial have gained even more significance. I thought the memorial with its two large dark gray gates, the reflecting pool and the 168 chairs symbolizing lost lives was a fitting tribute to the victims.

When you talk about the West Coast, Hollywood springs to mind. I took the train because I wanted to see some scenery and I didn’t have the option of the car. Houston’s railway station is very small, but the train is not very popular. Nevertheless, it was strange to read in the ticket office the notice “OFFICE CLOSED WHILE TRAIN IS IN THE STATION”. The train was a couple of hours late but this was not a big problem as it was a 36-hour train ride. Trains are often late, especially if there are big floods. My seat on the train was upstairs in a room with comfortable seats that converted into beds. Towels, bottled water, a fold-down table and a garment rack were also provided. The toilet and shower were downstairs and they were clean. Meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner) were included in the fare and the quality and quantity of the food was sufficiently good. You could use your electronic devices, though internet connections worked only when the train

Picture 5. Art Car Parade Picture 6. One of those interesting notices

8


was in a station. I didn’t take any local trains, but I would recommend everyone to try the train.

The scenery was mostly flat desert-like land with shrubs and some small hills and trees. It was interrupted by riverbeds in some places, where the scenery was more interesting and beautiful, especially near the Rio Grande.1

In Los Angeles, I took a Hollywood sightseeing tour on a red double decker. It was a round trip passing across Beverly Hills and expensive shopping areas. I saw the Farmers Market, CBS and Paramount Studios (the buildings), John Wayne’s bronze sculpture and the famous Hollywood sign. Finally, I enjoyed walking in the pleasant sunshine on Hollywood Boulevard, where people dressed up as various characters from films were waiting for tourists to join them for a photo. It was interesting to walk the star-studded sidewalks that I had seen on TV before and to stand in front of the Kodak Theatre, which hosts the Oscar ceremony.

I hadn’t heard about the Getty Museum before I went there, but it was well worth the visit. The museum complex is an architectural beauty, a combination of glass and white stone, and the south side affords a panoramic view of Los Angeles. The museum houses a bewildering variety of exhibits from tapestry to ceramics, from paintings to sculptures, from photographs to drawings, all coming from different periods.

The trip to LA didn’t provide me with breathtaking scenery, so I had another go. I flew to Flagstaff, AZ, and went on a guided tour to the Grand Canyon. It was beautiful, the dominant colors were various shades of purple, pink and

1 What else did I expect, when Amtrak’s schedule leaflet lists the following “scenic highlights”: southwestern desert, Mexican border, Bayou Country, Gulf Coast.

rose with some patches of green and sand. Our guide was a young man who stopped at several viewpoints and explained the geological history, flora and fauna of the Canyon. I learnt that the most dangerous creatures on top of the rim are the squirrels, as they are prone to aggressively taking food from tourists. If you decide to go there in the summer, take some sun cream, it was scorching hot.

5. AcknowledgementsI would like to thank the Hungarian-American Fulbright

Commission for this wonderful opportunity. My thanks also go to all those who gave me company, filled my time with precious moments or helped me in any way while I was in the US: my friends David and Karen, and their son Eric from Fort Worth, Suzanne, Mary and Don, Mary Louise and Rudy, as well as my landlady Jean from Houston, Davis and Carol from Oklahoma and the OISS staff at Rice, Adria, Sandra, Vanessa and the others.

Picture 7. Grand CanyonBibliographyCserép, Attila. 2008. Hungary’s Election Process. Retrieved from http://oiss.rice.edu/content.

aspx?id=116 Accessed March 30 2010.Dick, Steven J. and Steve Garber. 2005. Detailed Chronology of Events Surrounding the Apollo 13 Accident.

Retrieved from http://history.nasa.gov/Timeline/apollo13chron.html Accessed March 25 2010.

Finley, Ryan. n.d. SurveyMonkey. Portland, Oregon USA: SurveyMonkey.com. http://www.surveymonkey.com

Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr. and Nandini P. Nayak. 1989. Psycholinguistic studies on the syntactic behavior of idioms. Cognitive Psychology 21: 100-138.

Gibbs, Raymond W. Jr., Nandini P. Nayak and Cooper Cutting. 1989. How to kick the bucket and not decompose: analyzability and idiom processing. Journal of Memory and Language 28/5:576-593.

Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr., Nandini P. Nayak, John L. Bolton and Melissa E. Keppel. 1989. Speakers’ assumptions about the lexical flexibility of idioms. Memory and Cognition 17/1: 58-68.

Graff, David. 1995. North American News Text Corpus. Linguistic Data Consortium, Philadelphia.Hamblin, Jennifer L. and Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. 1999. Why you can’t kick the bucket as you

slowly die: verbs in idiom comprehension. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 28/1: 25-39.Langlotz, Andreas. 2006. Idiomatic Creativity: A Cognitive-Linguistic Model of Idiom-Representation and Idiom-

Variation in English. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.Macmillan English Dictionary. 2010. Retrieved from http://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/

british/progress Accessed April 23 2010.Scott, Mike. 2008. WordSmith Tools version 5. Liverpool: Lexical Analysis Software.Sunset Limited Modified Service: New Orleans to Los Angeles. Retrieved from http://www.amtrak.com/

servlet/ContentServer/AM_Route_C/1241245650939/1237405732511 Accessed March 30 2010.

idiom analyzability and variation

Documents