영어 관용어 학습과 합성성 원리

Principle o f Compositionality

This paper aims to examine the properties of English idioms, to classify them according to their morpho-syntactic/semantic structures, and finally to provide some suggestions for teaching materials and tips on how to use English idioms. Corpus-based studies of English idioms unveil that an idiom is part of a more general term, i. e.， fixed expression or multi-word lexical expressions and that their forms are often unstable. Fixedness seems to be a key property of idioms but they often go through syntactic substitutions or modifier variations. As proposed, there is no hard and fast cut-off line between what we call ’idioms’ and the common, ‘everyday chunks of English’. The previous accounts of English idioms generally confined their attention only to the most fixed idioms. That is, those idioms have been traditionally included in intuition-based language teaching materials just because they are low in frequency but very colorful, and consequently, psychologically more salient. However, the notion of idiom can be used to explain a number of things; in particular, syntactic and lexical variability and evaluative content embedded in the culture. We suggest here that better understanding of idioms would be possible through raising awareness of their variability. Secondly, idioms should be taught based on frequency of use, and sets of idioms taught should be comprised of representative samples of authentic corpora -not just rare and colorful expressions.