Letting the Cat out of the Bag: On Idiom Use and Representation

Resumen

This paper analyzes the concepts underlying idioms from a pragmatic perspective, following the Relevance Theory proposed by Sperber & Wilson (1995). Hence, the distinction between lexicalized and ad hoc concepts is essential for un-derstanding the nature of the concepts underlying idioms and their idiomatic vari-ants. The paper also introduces the idea that concepts expressed by idioms are lexi-calized to different degrees due to their extensive, recurrent and routine use in dis-course, whereas idiomatic variants must be contextually created from the lexicalized concept of the idiom which the variant makes implicitly manifest and which serves as the starting point for the inferential process. Likewise, the way in which concep-tual information is represented and stored in the mind provides an excellent account of how we retrieve and use idioms and their variants in communication: as factual assumptions in the case of idioms whose content is completely lexicalized or as meta-representations in the cases of variants or idioms with partial or attributive knowledge of the underlying concept.