Meanings above the word level: idioms
Idioms constitute another boundary case where it is not clear what the correct level is for the characterization of meaning. We defined idioms in 1.4.3 as non-compositional phrases – phrases like throw in the towel whose overall meaning is not the same as the combined meaning of the individual parts. However, it is often possible to advance an interpretation of the individual words of an idiom which removes its idiomatic or non-compositional character. For example, the English idiom to scoop the pool, which means something like ‘to win or gain everything’, seems on the face of it to lack any connection whatsoever with either pools or scooping: a speaker simply associates the meaning ‘win or gain everything’ with the entire unit scoop the pool, without trying to break the phrase down further. Nevertheless, if we imagine scoop as having a meaning like ‘quickly gather up a large quantity of something in a single movement’, and pool as meaning ‘the entire set of available items’ (cf. car-pool, pool of credits, etc.), then the arbitrariness and non-compositionality of the expression is reduced, and the interpretation ‘win or gain everything’ can follow unproblematically from the combined meanings of the expression’s elements. For an empirical inquiry, everything hangs on the question of whether speakers do in fact interpret scoop the pool compositionally or non-compositionally, and there is doubtless no single answer to this question. Thus, some English speakers will analyse it completely into its constituent parts in the way just mentioned, others will interpret it as a single, non-compositional idiom, and still others will interpret it as partly compositional: the ‘quickly gather up’ interpretation of scoop, for instance, might be ‘active’ for some English-speakers, while pool will not receive any compositional interpretation. The fact that a variety of possible interpretations is available for each component of the idiom, with consequent differences in the overall interpretation of the expression, only adds to the ambiguity. Thus, other speakers of English might associate scoop with a scoop in journalism (a news story obtained exclusively by a single journalist), while others might analyse pool as in some way referring to a body of water.
As we have been using the term, an idiom is a non-compositional com bination of words. But if we defi ne an idiom as a non-compositional com bination of morphemes, then idioms can also exist on the sublexical level. The English suffix -able is a case in point. Usually this suffix has its historical meaning, ‘able to be V-ed’: fillable ‘able to be filled’, emailable ‘able to be emailed’, movable ‘able to be moved’. In words like considerable and fashionable, however, this meaning is not present, and the entire word needs to be given a different analysis. Sublexical idioms are often found in many American languages, which are characterized by a large degree of noun-incorporation, a process in which independent noun stems may be compounded with a verb stem in order to produce a larger, derived verb. In the following example from Lakota (Siouan, Mississippi Valley; Rankin et al. 2002: 181–182), a noun stem meaning ‘heart’ is compounded with the verb stem meaning ‘be good’; the meaning of the resulting com pound, ‘I made him/her angry’, is in no way simply the combination of the individual meanings of its component morphemes:
Not all noun-incorporation is as semantically opaque or idiomatic as this, but there are many less extreme examples. An interesting one comes from another American language, Comanche (Uto-Aztecan, Oklahoma). Thus, the composed meaning of the noun-verb compound in (22) is something like ‘throw paper by force’. This verb can only be used, however, to refer to the type of paper-throwing that one does when playing cards: the meaning of the incorporated noun wana is ‘paper’, but in the verb in question it only designates playing cards. As a result, the compound means ‘to gamble’ (Mithun 1984: 855):
