Week 34: 6th – 12th May
I’ve long been interested in the nature of idioms and how they can contribute to an understanding of emotionality in different languages. Specifically, my previous interests have related to the ways in which animals are referred to in idiomatic language and whether there are correlations between the ways in which animals were discussed and the beliefs about, or uses of, those animals in that particular region.
Interpretation
It also highlighted some relevant biases on my part as I found myself to be the most interested in the phrases which made the least sense when translated into English, perhaps as they seemed to portray a kind of misdirected authenticity, which supported my ideas of cultural specificity. This bias seems to be reiterated in Jag Bhalla’s 2009 Guardian article The Idiotic Joys of Idioms, which lists the some of the ‘weird and wonderful’ phrases from around the world including ‘To seize the moon by the teeth’ a French idiom meaning ‘to attempt the impossible’ as well as ‘to belch smoke from the seven orifices of the head’ meaning ‘to be furious’ in Chinese.
However, having started to work through these preconceptions of ‘authenticity’, I’ve now become more interested in the structural elements of idioms and how they might reflect a more universal approach to translation and interpretation, not just geographically, but also temporally. These elements of emotionality and language also relate to my current investigations of affect and semiotics in artist books.
What is an idiom?
Bárbara Eizaga Rebollar in her paper, Letting the Cat out of the Bag: On Idiom Use and Representation, discusses how ‘idioms were considered to be peripheral expressions of language characterized as a fixed and anomalous group of two or more elements with a conventional meaning’. This means that the idiomatic meaning of a phrase was believed to be fixed and determinate, therefore requiring specific cultural knowledge to understand the conceptual links within the phrase.
However, following the Relevance Theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson in 1995, she suggests how concepts expressed by idioms are memorised as part of an internal lexicon to differing degrees, allowing for further conceptual structures to be created according to inferences by the speaker. In other words, such idioms are subject to the context (sentence) in which they occur, allowing for interpretation without prior knowledge. These meanings are therefore constituted of a range of lexical, syntactic and semantic flexibility.
Types of idiom
Different types of idioms may be classed as descriptive, interpretive or metalinguistic. Descriptive idioms refer to instances where the recurrent links between specific phrases and concepts, which don’t originally register as truthful, create a stabilised meaning in the memory. Interpretive or metalinguistic uses of idioms describe intermediate stages of conventionalization, depending on how the phrase has been constructed in relation to learned idioms.
Thus, although there is no complete identification between the phrase and the concept it connotes, it is interpreted in relation to the original, thereby producing a new idiom. Interpretive idioms refer to semantic resemblances with descriptive idioms, while metalinguistic idioms have formal resemblances. Equally, over time, interpretive and metalinguistic idioms can become descriptive as their meanings become more fixed within language as compound phrases.
Memetics
This new research into the way that language adapts and spreads can be likened to the idea of a meme: a method of imitation that transmits ideas through society. Coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, it refers to a meme as a unit of cultural information in the form of a cognitive or behavioural pattern. Other writers on the topic include Susan Blackmore in The Meme Machine, Seth Godin in Unleashing the Ideavirus and Francis Heylighen in What makes a meme successful? Considering the ways that idioms and memes may help with the interpretation and transmission of ideas, I’m interested to see how these can apply to my research in the ways that art objects are understood.
