Prosody and idioms in English英文电子图书.pdf

Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2006) 1580–1597 /locate/pragma Prosody and idioms in English Michael Ashby Department of Phonetics and Linguistics, UCL, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom Received 28 February 2004; received in revised form 8 March 2005; accepted 10 March 2005 Abstract English idioms commonly appear to exhibit relatively fixed prosodic patterns, and departure from the expected prosodic pattern can give rise to humorous and bizarre effects. As idioms are generally supposed to require phrasal entries in the mental lexicon, there is some initial plausibility in the proposal that such entries might include arbitrary prosodic or accentual properties. Various categories of idiom can be distinguished, according to which aspects of the prosodic pattern seem to be fixed, and the relationship the pattern bears to those which would be expected on corresponding literal expressions. Nevertheless it is argued that the prosodic patterns of idioms are in reality neither fixed nor arbitrary. The bizarre effects in interpretation result not from deviation from a lexically specified pattern, but from the attempt to introduce focus distinctions into the non-compositional parts of idioms. Implications for psycholinguistic studies of the processing of ambiguous sentences are discussed. # 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Prosody; Idiom; Ambiguity For many years, linguists and psychologists have regarded idioms as an important source of data for the development of syntactic and semantic theory, and the study of language processing. But among the many studies devoted to idioms (see extensive references in Nunberg et al., 1994; Titone and Connine, 1999), very few make any reference to t