Corpus investigations show very clearly that literal equivalents to metaphorical FEIs occur comparatively infrequently. In Section 3.2.2, I discussed how often in searching OHPC for FEI tokens, all or nearly all resulting matches for
queries, even crudely specified queries, realized the target FEI type: spill the
beans and weather the storm were cases in point. Such cases support the view
that where metaphorical FEIs exist, their literal equivalents are avoided in free text: the idiomatic supersedes or blocks the literal. Compare Chafe's
hypothesis ( 1968: 111) that the idiomatic meaning of a string will be commoner than its literal one: this usually proves to be true. Of course, in many cases literal uses are unlikely for realworld reasons. In literal contexts, or in corpora at any rate, people do not bite bullets, they bite food or food-like things, or their nails: they do not even spill beans very frequently, but rather coffee, beer, and other liquids. Selection restrictions merely formalize or reinforce this. The dividing-line between 'impossible' and 'possible' is valid in the abstract, but it ceases to be a meaningful distinction in practice.
A few psycholinguistic studies look specifically at ambiguity, and they tie in with general findings that idiomatic meanings are processed faster than literal ones. Van Lancker and Canter ( 1981) looked for phonological disambiguating clues, and they report, amongst other things, that where utterances were decontextualized, the hearer-informants inferred an idiomatic meaning
regardless. (The informants made more accurate judgements when speakers deliberately set out to emphasize either a literal or an idiomatic reading.) The default reading for potentially ambiguous strings therefore appears to be idiomatic. Some other studies were interested in correlating literal meaning or likelihood of literal meaning with processing times, and so asked informants to rate FEIs according to their familiarity with the items and their assessments of the frequency of the literal and idiomatic meanings. Popiel and McRae
-180-
TABLE 7.1. Informant ratings for FEIs Assessed
frequency frequencyAssessed familiarityAssessed familiarityAssessed (literal) (idiomatic) (literal) (idiomatic)
beat around the bush 1.65 6.3 1.2 5.3
break the ice 4.00 5.79 3.08 4.69
kick the bucket 3.17 5.9 1.83 4.05
let the cat out of the bag 2.08 5.92 1.3 4.41 Source: Popiel and McRae ( 1988).
Assessed
frequency frequencyAssessed familiarityAssessed familiarityAssessed (literal) (idiomatic) (literal) (idiomatic) Source: Popiel and McRae ( 1988).
skate on thin ice 4.55 6.36 2.67 4.98
spill the beans 2.95 5.75 1.62 3.97
(1988) found that high ratings for idiomatic meanings were independent of literal meanings, and that there was greater variation with respect to intuited frequency ratings for literal meanings. Cronket al. ( 1993) compared subjective assessments of the frequency of idiomatic uses and corresponding literal uses with an 'objective' score derived from the frequencies of the constituent words, as listed in Kučera and Francis ( 1967): they did not attempt to assess actual frequencies of literal or idiomatic uses of the strings in question, and it is unsurprising that they found informants' ratings to be more useful than 'objective' scores.
It is worth looking briefly at informant ratings from these last two studies for a few potentially ambiguous FEIs, chosen because their ambiguity has been discussed elsewhere in the literature. Popiel and McRae's informants rated items on a 7-point scale, where 1 is rare and 7 is very familiar, or encountered 'every day' (see Table 7.1 ). This suggests that informants regard idiomatic meanings as more likely, with only break the ice and perhaps skate on thin ice having plausible literal uses.
Cronket al.'s informants rated items on a 5-point scale, where 5 is rare and 1 is very familiar (see Table 7.2 ). These are comparable findings, with literal uses consistently rated lower than idiomatic. In both studies, let the cat out of
the bag shows the largest gap between literal and idiomatic ratings.
What does the evidence in BofE suggest? Table 7.3 gives absolute frequencies: all searches looked for very loose syntagmatic associations of constituent
lexical words, with no restrictions on inflection or constituent determiners. With the exception of break the ice and in hot water, idiomatic uses are
overwhelmingly more common than literal ones. -181-
TABLE 7.2. Informant ratings for FEIs Proportion of informants who rated literal meaning Familiarity with literal meaning Proportion of informants who rated idiomatic meaning Familiarity with idiomatic meaning
break the ice 100% 2.8 100% 2.1
in hot water 100% 3.0 100% 2.3
kick the bucket 89.5% 3.1 85.7% 2.2
let the cat out of
the bag 77.8% 3.9 100% 2.3
Proportion of informants who rated literal meaning Familiarity with literal meaning Proportion of informants who rated idiomatic meaning Familiarity with idiomatic meaning
Source: Cronket al. ( 1993)
out on a limb 89.5% 3.8 100% 2.9
skate on thin
ice 89.5% 3.2 100% 2.8
spill the beans 94.4% 3.5 100% 2.2
Break the ice has two idiomatic meanings: 'disperse awkwardness in social interaction' (189 tokens) and, in sports contexts, 'score for the first time in a game or season' (12 tokens). Break the ice has a literal to idiomatic ratio of 1:3, but this reflects all BofE cases of the lemma break occurring within a
5-word window of ice, with no further syntagmatic restrictions. However, if the different structures of these matches are considered, different ratios emerge (see Table 7.4 ). Patterns are clear. If the string includes the, the ratio of literal to idiomatic is roughly 1:6. If the string is associated with an adverb particle, almost all tokens are literal (and the only idiomatic example may in fact be an ad hoc metaphor influenced by the FEI). The literal to idiomatic ratio for
transitive or passive break the ice,
TABLE7.3. BofE frequencies for literal and idiomatic meanings Literal Idiomatic frequency frequency
beat about/around the bush 0 109
break the ice 65 201
in hot water 181 178
kick the bucket 7 42
let the cat out of the bag 0 91
(out) on a limb 4 249
(skate) on thin ice 0 241
spill the beans 2 198
-182-
TABLE 7.4. Break the ice: structures, meanings, and frequencies
Structure Literal Interaction Sports meaning meaning meaning
break the ice 18 152 10
break ice 6 1 1
break the ice + adverb particle 10 0 0
break ice + adverb particle 6 0 0
the ice is broken 1 31 1
the ice breaks 6 4 0
ice breaks 5 0 0
the ice breaks + adverb particle 7 1 0
without adverbial particle, is 1:10. Thus the absence of a determiner or the presence of a collocation with adverbial particles enhances the likelihood of a literal meaning, while transitive or passive uses are more likely to be idiomatic. The related compounds or transformations ice-breaker and ice-breaking have literal to idiomatic ratios in BofE of respectively 1:4 and 1:2 (taking icebreaker 'kind of ship' as literal).
In hot water has a literal to idiomatic ratio of 1:1. However, certain collocations
and structures are strongly associated with either literal or idiomatic meanings. The most important discriminator is the valency of the noun for which in hot
water supplies a locative: when humans are in hot water, the idiomatic
meaning is inferred; when inanimates or human limbs are in hot water, the literal meaning is inferred. The preceding verbs also discriminate. The idiomatic meaning is strongly associated with be, land (someone), and find oneself, whereas the literal is associated with verbs such as dip, dissolve, soak, wash, and immerse: verbs which collocate very frequently with water in other
contexts. Similarly with the dynamic transformation or variation into hot water: collocating verbs polarize according to meaning. The idiomatic meaning usually collocates with get or occasionally another verb of motion such as run, walk, or stray, whereas the literal meaning collocates with dip, plunge, or put. With respect to the discontinuous string in--hot water: where the slot is filled by
scalding, steaming, and boiling, all realizations are literal, but where it is filled
by more, most, and further, all realizations in BofE are idiomatic. (Other quantifiers such as plenty of, a little, and--tablespoons of are associated with the literal, but intensifiers such as very and extremely are mixed.) What is happening here is that collocation is reflecting the
-183-
semantics of the different contexts of the literal and idiomatic meanings. The important point is that in over 300 tokens of this string, none is ambiguous at a clausal level within their co-texts.
In the case of kick the bucket, 3 of the 7 literal tokens are associated with the adverbial particles over, along, or away, and 1 has a pile of buckets as object, not the bucket. One literal token has a possessive rather than the, and another is passive. A further literal token occurs in the context of explaining the origin of the FEI. The only genuine, active, literal token has a cow as grammatical subject, and it occurs in conversation and provokes laughter at the implied pun. This underscores the tenacity of idiomatic meaning.