Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2006) 1580–1597 www.elsevier.com/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 the specifically spoken form of idioms, whether segmental or prosodic. The present paper examines prosodic cues that may influence the perception of an ambiguous phrase as idiomatic or literal, and thus concerns a possible interface between prosody and idiomaticity. The starting point for the investigation is the observation that many so-called idioms in English are readily destroyed in speech by departure from an expected accentual pattern. Consider the idiom (1)
to have eyes in the back of one’s head
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This appears in utterances such as (2)
She has eyes in the back of her HEAD
(Capitals indicate pitch accent; the last (or sole) accent in a phrase is the nuclear accent.) There is, however, something plainly wrong with the interpretation that comes to mind in relation to the accentuation in (3): (3)
She has eyes in the BACK of her head
Listeners generally find (3) humorous in effect, and agree that it does not contain a satisfactory use of the idiom (1). It is worth pointing out that (3) does not derive its bizarre effect from a merely random disordering of prosodic pattern. In fact, given that everyone has eyes in the front of their heads, back might appear to be a reasonable candidate to carry the nuclear accent. Contrast is generally a powerful factor in accent placement in English. Consider (4): (4)
I could get no answer at the front of the house, so I went round to the BACK of the house
From this we conclude that the accentual pattern of (3), though well-formed and to a certain degree logical, has some specific fault which forces an inappropriate interpretation. Idiom (1) is not an isolated case in being sensitive to accentual pattern. Examples can be multiplied. Consider (5)–(7). (5) (6) (7)
It was raining cats and DOGS It was raining cats AND dogs It was raining CATS and dogs
Here it is plain that (5) is the expected pattern, while both (6) and (7) have the same type of bizarre/humorous effect noted in relation to (3). The examples considered so far have in common that the ‘expected’ patterns have final nuclei (that is, the last accent is placed on the last available syllable) while the bizarre patterns have an earlier nucleus. We now show that the position of the nuclear accent in the phrase is not the controlling factor. Consider the idiom in (8). (8)
to have a chip on one’s shoulder
This appears in utterances such as: (9)
John has a CHIP on his shoulder
This time, the ‘expected’ pattern has a pre-final nucleus. The last available syllable for accent is the first syllable of shoulder, and placing the nuclear accent there yields: (10)
John has a chip on his SHOULDer
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Listeners generally find that (10) fails, exhibiting essentially the same effect observed in (3), (6) and (7). It seems to be immaterial whether or not a pre-nuclear pitch accent is applied to chip, so that (11) also has essentially the same effect as (10). (11)
John has a CHIP on his SHOULDer
Again, examples can be multiplied. Idioms (12) and (13) for instance seem to behave in the same way as (8): (12) (13)
to have a BEE in one’s bonnet to push the BOAT out
This work was originally prompted by the requirement to give useful indications of accentuation of phrases in learners’ dictionaries of English. The examples already discussed are enough to show that idioms need to be accompanied in such dictionaries by an indication of where the nuclear accent should fall. A single accent-mark is sufficient in most cases. The idioms discussed so far can thus be entered in the learners’ dictionary as (14)–(18). (14) (15) (16) (17) (18)
to to to to to
have eyes in the back of one’s head be raining cats and dogs have a chip on one’s shoulder have a bee in one’s bonnet push the boat out
This type of marking requires intelligent interpretation by the learner. So for example the accent mark does not show that a nucleus is obligatory in the place indicated, but indicates the required location of the nucleus if it falls within the idiom. That a nucleus is not obligatory within the idiom is shown by examples such as (19): (19)
I thought PETER was bad enough j but it turns out that JOHN has a chip on his shoulder jTOO j
(A vertical bar j indicates division into intonational phrases.) The learner must also be assumed to know that one must not divide the idioms into phrases (strictly, as will be seen later, certain divisions are harmless, while others cause dramatic failure of the idiom). So for example (20) is, if anything, worse than (10): (20)
John has a \CHIP j on his \SHOULDer j
(The mark \ indicates that the pitch accent is a falling tone.) Here (20) has a nucleus on chip as required by the dictionary representation (16), but this is not sufficient to guarantee the correct idiomatic interpretation. So for a learner’s dictionary, the use of a simple accent mark, intelligently interpreted, can guide the user towards satisfactory accentual treatments of idioms. But what about the mental lexicon of native speakers? Because idioms are arbitrary in composition and meaning, they must presumably require entries in the mental lexicon. Is it plausible that those entries also contain
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information about accentual properties? Given the phenomena reviewed so far, there is some initial attraction in a conjecture along the lines of (21): (21)
The accentual pattern an of idiom is fixed, and is part of the lexical entry for the idiom
Reasonable as this idea may seem, we will now consider arguments which lead to the modification and possible rejection of (21). To begin with, it is not difficult to show that the first part of (21) is too sweeping. By no means all of the aspects of the accentuation of an idiom are fixed. Consider (2) again, repeated here as (22): (22)
She has eyes in the back of her HEAD
We seem to have established that a nuclear accent is required on HEAD. But we have paid no attention to the treatment of eyes and back (either or both of which could be accented), or to the possibility of intonation-phrase divisions (which are independently possible after the same two items). All of (23)–(30) are actually possible (there may be restrictions on which types of pitch accent can be applied) with interpretations similar to that of (22). (23) (24) (25) (26) (27) (28) (29) (30)
She She She She She She She She
has has has has has has has has
EYES in the BACK of her HEAD EYES in the back of her HEAD eyes in the BACK of her HEAD EYES j in the back of her HEAD EYES j in the BACK of her HEAD EYES j in the BACK j of her HEAD eyes in the BACK j of her HEAD EYES in the BACK j of her HEAD
These examples differ from (22), if at all, in intensity or emphasis. They do not have the humorous/bizarre interpretation linked with (3), repeated here as (31): (31)
She has eyes in the BACK of her head.
Bearing in mind examples (22)–(30), and contra (21), the most we could claim is that some aspects of the prosodic pattern of an idiom appear to be fixed. An idiom, therefore, cannot in general be a kind of ‘soundbite’ which, once activated, will emerge with the same prosodic pattern each time. (Of course, we cannot exclude the possibility that the lexicon could contain some items of that type.) But if the accentual pattern of an idiom is only partly specified in the lexicon, this raises the interesting formal question of how such partial specifications get elaborated into full specifications. Suppose the internal partial specification is something along the lines suggested in (14)–(18), that is, with a very parsimonious marking of pattern. Then mechanisms are needed that will take, say (14) and derive any of (22)–(30) while excluding (31). At first sight it may seem that there are grounds here for distinguishing nuclear accent from other accents and claiming something along the lines of (32).
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In the lexicon, an idiom is marked (once) for nuclear accent. This is the location in which a nucleus will appear if any nucleus is applied to the idiom
There is a suggestive parallel between what is stated in (32) and the concept of lexical stress, the lexically stressed syllable of a word being the syllable on which a nuclear accent will appear if a nuclear accent is applied to the word. But as (20) demonstrated, it is not sufficient that the elaborated accentual specification applied to an idiom preserves the lexically specified location of a nuclear accent. It seems very unlikely that any formal mechanical way of elaborating accentual specifications can be made to work. In any case, the effort would be misplaced since it is intuitively clear that what is wrong with examples such as (3), (6), (10), etc., has nothing to do with their form as such. They are wrong because they mean the wrong thing. These considerations tend to the conclusion that both (21) and (32) are mistaken in picking directly on an aspect of prosodic form. Arguably, what is fixed about the idioms (and possibly marked in the lexicon) is some aspect of their meaning and interpretation which is closely connected with nucleus location, a prime candidate being the concept of focus. Before we explore this further, we consider a wider range of idioms, and ask how typical it is for nucleus location to be apparently fixed. At least three distinct cases can be identified. In Case (i), which applies to the examples considered so far, an idiom may be sensitive to accentual pattern (in the sense that deviation in crucial respects from an expected pattern destroys the idiom and brings a humorous/bizarre effect), but at the same time this ‘expected’ pattern is also congruent with a literal (compositional) reading of the same expression. Consider, for example, an utterance of (33). (33)
She has eyes in the back of her HEAD
Though in almost all real contexts there will be a bias towards the idiomatic meaning (‘‘She is very observant/difficult to deceive’’), it is still the case that the utterance (complete with its prosody) is actually ambiguous between the idiomatic meaning and a literal meaning (we can perhaps imagine a context concerning some deity or mythical part-human figure with many eyes). So the one accentual pattern that suits the idiomatic meaning also suits a literal meaning— and, furthermore, it is the least marked or most expected accentual pattern for that literal meaning. In another type, call it Case (ii), there is actually a prosodic contrast between the idiom and a corresponding (or related) literal expression. Certain phrasal verbs provide good examples. Consider (34) and (35). (34) (35)
It was POURing down It was pouring DOWN
Of these, only (34) can bear the idiomatic meaning ‘‘It was raining heavily’’. By contrast, (35) seems to contain an occurrence of the ordinary intransitive phrasal verb ‘‘pour down’’ in the sense ‘‘flow copiously downwards’’, with ‘‘it’’ probably referring to some unspecified fluid. As a further example of Case (ii), consider (36). A Case (i) example (37) is provided for comparison. (36) (37)
They’re ROLLing in money They’re rolling in the AISLES
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Here it seems plain that (36) naturally bears the idiomatic interpretation ‘‘they are very wealthy’’, and (37) the interpretation ‘‘they are greatly amused’’. As seen in the other Case (i) examples already discussed, (37) is also the least-marked/most expected pattern for the literal interpretation (‘‘they are physically rolling in the spaces between the seats’’). But for the literal sense ‘‘they are physically rolling around partly immersed in currency’’ (implausible, but we can perhaps imagine a stunt in a TV game show), (36) is not appropriate. We would instead expect (38): (38)
They are rolling in MONEY
So (36) and (38) are in contrast, in much the same way as (34) and (35). All of the examples considered so far seem to suggest that what is fixed about the prosody of idioms (if anything) is their accentual pattern. We can, however, point to instances where the actual tone choices of the prosodic pattern seem to be fixed, or at least highly constrained. Consider (39). (39)
I could eat a \HORSE
Note that this seems perfectly natural with a falling tone applied to horse, but very strange indeed if this tone is changed—say, to a falling–rising tone: (40)
I could eat a \/HORSE
This seems to invite a humorous or bizarre interpretation, reminiscent of the effect observed with examples such as (3) and (10). Other examples of an association between an idiom and a specific tone are perhaps seen in: (41)
\TELL me about it
With a falling (or rising–falling) tone on TELL this commonly has the idiomatic sense ‘‘You don’t need to tell me about the difficulties/misfortunes you are mentioning. I have already experienced them fully myself’’. This sense does not seem to be available when the expression is said with a rise as in (42). (42)
/TELL me about it
This seems only to have a literal meaning: ‘‘Please continue, and tell me more about what you have mentioned’’. A similar distinction can be seen in (43) and (44): (43) (44)
Join the \CLUB Join the /CLUB
Here (43) may have the idiomatic meaning ‘‘We all have the same feelings/experience’’, while (44) is a literal suggestion ‘‘Become a member of the club’’. It is worth pointing out that both (41) and (43) may also have straightforward literal meanings (as indeed can (39), though the contexts in which it would be appropriate are somewhat limited). On the face of things, then, it seems that at least some idioms may have arbitrarily fixed tone choices, in addition to apparently fixed accentuation. Call this Case (iii).
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The three types just identified can be summarised thus: (45)
(46) (47)
Case (i). The accentual pattern of the idiom is the same as that of the least-marked literal version (to have a CHIP on one’s shoulder, to have eyes in the back of one’s HEAD) Case (ii). The idiom has an accentual pattern different from the corresponding literal expression (POUR down, be ROLLing in money) Case (iii). Even the tone choice in the idiom is fixed, or at least highly constrained (I could eat a \HORSE)
The first part of the argument, up to (32), was concerned with Case (i) examples, and was tending to the conclusion that in the lexicon, an idiom is marked (once) for nuclear accent, this being the location in which a nucleus will appear if any nucleus is applied to the idiom. We had also seen indications, however, that formal difficulties were likely to arise in the process of elaborating into full prosodic specifications the parsimonious accent-marking envisaged in the lexicon, and that the proposal was counter-intuitive anyway because it was concerned with form rather than with meaning. Now Cases (ii) and (iii) as just outlined raise the prospect that further arbitrary prosodic information must appear in the lexicon for the idioms concerned. Nevertheless, in the remainder of this paper I pursue the idea that idioms in Case (i) need no arbitrary prosodic marking in the lexicon, pointing out also that the examples given under Cases (ii) and (iii) are probably not arbitrary either. The situation we have observed for idioms in Case (i) is close to paradox. On the one hand, deviation from the expected accentual pattern destroys the idiomatic meaning, suggesting that the idiom has a (partly) fixed accentual pattern associated with it, as noted in (20) and (32). But this pattern is far from arbitrary. As noted in (45), it is in fact precisely the accentual pattern that is expected for the least-marked literal interpretation of the same expression. This is very strange. We suppose that, in the (perfectly plausible) literal case where it is remarked that John has some sort of physical chip-like object located on his shoulder, then general principles about English prosody will guide us to (48): (48)
John has a CHIP on his shoulder.
This pattern is paralleled by any number of similar (literal) expressions, for example (49): (49)
John has a BAG on his shoulder
It is hardly plausible that when (48) is a literal utterance, the nucleus on CHIP is specified by a general rule, but when (48) is idiomatic the same nucleus location results from an arbitrary marker in the lexical entry for to have a chip on one’s shoulder. On the contrary, it seems very likely that exactly the same general provisions must be responsible for both. Consider again (3), (6), (7), (10), repeated here as (50)–(53): (50) (51) (52) (53)
She has eyes in the BACK of her head It was raining cats AND dogs It was raining CATS and dogs John has a chip on his SHOULDer
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Evidently, what these have in common is a narrow focus (or ‘‘contrastive stress’’), whereas what the regular idiomatic interpretations have, in common with the most usual literal meanings, is broad focus (‘‘normal stress’’). This might lead one to speculate along the lines of (54): (54)
An element within an idiom may not bear narrow focus (‘‘contrastive stress’’)
But while (54) may come close to capturing an important insight, it cannot be true as it stands. The Case (ii) examples (for instance, be ROLLing in money) are direct counterexamples, since narrow focus seems to be an integral part of the idiom itself. This leads us to reformulate (54) as (55): (55)
An idiom is marked in the lexicon for focus, and that focus specification is fixed for all utterances of the idiom
Particularly compelling evidence supporting the notion that idioms have fixed focus rather than fixed nucleus comes from those idioms which seem to have more than one ‘normal’ accentual pattern. Do we prefer (56) or (57)? (56) (57)
When the CHIPS are down When the chips are DOWN
It seems that either is possible. Similarly, I have overheard both (58) and (59) used in the idiomatic sense ‘‘there is still a further opportunity’’; and both (60) and (61) used in the idiomatic sense ‘‘it remains to be seen’’. (58) (59) (60) (61)
[A] [A] [A] [A]
The The The The
DOOR is open (to ..) door is OPen (to ..) JURy’s out jury’s OUT
(Following Stubbs (2001) the indication [A] signals an attested example, while [I] means an invented example. All examples up to this point have been in the [I] category). Now an account along the lines of (32), which claims that idioms have fixed nucleus position, has somehow to cope with the fact that at least some idioms seem to have alternative nucleus positions. The mental lexicon must then contain both (56) and (57), both (58) and (59) and so on. But this misses a generalisation. Examples such as (58)–(61) (in their literal meanings) and numerous parallel examples have long engaged the attention of those working on the concept of focus in English intonation (Ladd, 1996:199). Both versions have some claim to be the neutral or ‘‘all-focus’’ renderings, strongly suggesting that they do not differ in focus. It surely cannot be an accident that variation is found in the accentuation for the idiomatic meanings in precisely those cases where there are two possible broad-focus renderings for the literal meaning too. The idea embodied in (55) is thus strongly supported. The analysis developed so far can perhaps begin to offer an explanation for interesting experimental results reported by Van Lancker and Canter (1981). It was pointed out in relation to (33) that it is actually ambiguous between idiomatic and literal interpretations. This will be true in general for utterances which include Case (i) idioms. Van Lancker and Canter (1981) introduce the useful term ‘ditropic’ to refer to the type of ambiguity which results when a sentence includes
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material which may be interpreted either literally or idiomatically. Taking a range of idioms (rotten to the core, keep a stiff upper lip, spill the beans, etc.) they constructed ditropically ambiguous sentences and embedded each of these in two brief stories which provided different disambiguating contexts. In one of each pair of stories it was clear that the ambiguous sentence was to be understood literally, while in the other it was to be taken idiomatically. As an example consider the sentence (62). (62)
He didn’t know that he was skating on thin ice
This appeared in one story about a boy venturing on to a frozen lake, and in another about a man taking an entirely different sort of risk (by asking a married woman for a date). Van Lancker and Canter recorded talkers reading these stories, and then excised the ditropically ambiguous portions from their contexts and played them to listeners, whose task was to decide for each excerpt whether it was idiomatic or literal. The initial results indicated that listeners could not reliably distinguish the two types, but when the experimenters repeated the test having instructed the speakers to make the literal/idiomatic difference as clear as they could ‘‘listeners were easily able to identify the literal or idiomatic versions of the same ditropic sentences presented in pairs or singly’’ (Van Lancker and Canter, 1981:68). The listeners’ ability to identify the two versions out of context clearly shows that there must be phonetic cues guiding their interpretation, and in a follow-up study the experimenters performed a careful and wide-ranging auditory and instrumental analysis of their stimuli in order to locate these cues (Van Lancker et al., 1981). Their claim is that when literal and idiomatic renderings are compared, the literal versions turn out to have longer durations, more pauses, and more pitch accents (among other factors). They attribute this to assumed differences in the manner in which novel (literal) and overlearned (idiomatic) utterances are produced. A novel utterance is being computed as it is produced. It seems natural that this process should be slower, more careful, and more prone to pausing than the mere rehearsal of a familiar phrase which has been learned as a whole. It is of course entirely possible that the different processing loads involved in computing a novel utterance or repeating a well-worn formula might leave tell-tale phonetic cues in the speech output, and that listeners could be sensitive to this. The Van Lancker and Canter (1981) experiment is still quoted in the literature as supporting that notion (Wray, 2003). But there are problems with this interpretation of Van Lancker and Canter’s results. To begin with, the speakers in their experiments were strictly not ‘‘producing’’ any utterances of their own, novel or otherwise. They were reading aloud the scripts of the invented stories. Further, the literal and idiomatic renderings were only reliably discriminable when the readers were instructed to make the difference as clear as possible. All of this requires us to assume (a) that speakers and listeners are (presumably unconsciously) aware of the phonetic cues that tend to signal whether an utterance is novel or formulaic, and (b) that speakers can exaggerate these cues to order in a convincing manner, even when reading aloud scripted speech. But (55) provides the basis for an alternative explanation of the experiment. Suppose that speakers and listeners know that idioms are easily destroyed by departing from their prescribed focus specifications. Indeed, they must ‘know’ this if they are amused and puzzled by examples such as (3), (6), (7) and (10). When the speakers are instructed to make the literal/idiomatic distinction as clear as possible, they can introduce focus changes of various sorts into the intended ‘literal’ examples, thereby wrecking them as idioms. The listeners are in a forcedchoice situation, so on hearing a stimulus which because of its focus specification definitely
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cannot be idiomatic, they will categorise it as ‘literal’. (Notice that it need not seem to be a natural or even interpretable literal reading.) Overall, it seems quite probable that the effects in the Van Lancker–Canter experiment may have resulted at least in part from the readers applying focus distinctions to some of the intended ‘literal’ versions (whether consciously or not). Crucially, focus was not controlled in the experiment, and the concept of focus plays no part in the authors’ discussion.1 On the account which has been developed so far in this paper, it appears that prosodic patterns are sometimes capable of blocking the idiomatic interpretation of ditropically ambiguous sentences. It is important to clarify the distinction between that supposed categorical effect (which in some sense deserves to be called a linguistic or competence effect) and the gradient (or performance) effect implied by Van Lancker and Canter (1981). A listener who attends to a spoken version of a ditropically ambiguous sentence, and succeeds in determining whether the idiomatic or the literal meaning is intended, might be guided by cues of either type. If the spoken stimulus carries a categorical linguistic indication which blocks the idiomatic interpretation, the listener can arrive only at the literal interpretation, and will do this whether or not the stimulus seems to carry the performance hallmarks of novel production. Despite the title of their paper, Van Lancker and Canter are not claiming that the prosodic cues which they note serve to disambiguate their stimuli, but rather that the cues have a bearing on the interpretation of stimuli which, in the linguistic sense, remain ambiguous. In fact Van Lancker and Canter’s results could only support the psycholinguistic interpretation which they and others wish to place on them if it were shown that the actual spoken stimuli (not just their written versions) were still ditropically ambiguous. This indicates the need for a further type of control in any replication of the experiment. There are indeed many Case (i) idioms which do not lend themselves to categorical disambiguation by prosodic means, however, hard speakers may try. As a result, real misunderstandings can occur, and the possibility of such misunderstandings is a fruitful source of humour. We will consider first a humorous example and then a real-life example. In both, a speaker uses a ditropically ambiguous sentence, intending the literal meaning. This is misunderstood by the listener, who assumes the alternate (idiomatic) meaning. In an episode (A star is Burns) of the animated TV series The Simpsons there is a scene in which the young child Lisa is precociously enumerating to her mother the intellectual qualities she admires in a (male) film critic they have both just been watching on TV (Groening, 2002). At this point her father, Homer, enters the room, and it is evident that he hears Lisa’s remarks but is unaware of what occasioned them. Although Homer famously embodies the antithesis of the qualities Lisa is mentioning, we begin to see the humorous possibility that he may vainly interpret Lisa’s remarks as referring to himself. That he does so appears to be confirmed when Homer utters (62): (62)
My EARS are burning
We interpret this in its idiomatic sense ‘‘I think I hear myself being talked about’’. However, when Lisa replies ‘‘I wasn’t talking about you, Dad’’ Homer produces the clarification (63), which is accompanied by puffs of smoke from his ears.
1
A replication of the experiment, with controls for focus effects, has been conducted (with Katy Mackay), and a report is in preparation.
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No my EARS are REALly BURNing I wanted to see inside, so I lit a Q-tip
Acoustic analyses of (62) and the corresponding portion of (63) were made from the soundtrack and appear as Figs. 1 and 2. The three panels show (i) at the top, the acoustic waveform, (ii) centre, a wideband spectrogram (300 Hz bandwidth analysing filter), (iii) bottom, the fundamental frequency curve. Reference to the fundamental frequency curves confirms the accentual patterns already shown impressionistically in (62) and (63). Homer’s first utterance (62) is produced with a single pitch
Fig. 1. (From top) speech waveform, wideband spectrogram, and fundamental frequency curve for the utterance My EARS are burning. The pitch peak is located at around time 0.45 s.
Fig. 2. (From top) speech waveform, wideband spectrogram, and fundamental frequency curve for the utterance My EARS are REALly BURNing. The three pitch peaks are approximately at 0.35, 0.6 and 0.95 s. The high frequency noise which begins around 0.4 s into the utterance is a ‘‘whoosh’’ sound-effect accompanying the smoke which is seen coming from Homer Simpson’s ears.
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accent on EARS. This takes the form of a stylised fall, the syllable EARS being on a relatively high pitch, and the following syllables on a sustained mid pitch. In the clarification (63), which is heard as a single intonation phrase ending with a falling nucleus, there are three pitch accents, the first being on EARS, the final (nuclear) accent on BURNing, and a (somewhat weaker) accent on the additional word REALly. It is interesting to compare these patterns with the supposed prosodic differences between idiomatic and literal renderings noted by Van Lancker and Canter. In agreement with one of their findings, Homer’s attempted literal clarification (63) does indeed contain more pitch accents than (62), the version which we initially interpret as idiomatic. On the other hand, contrary to the Van Lancker and Canter findings, the literal version is spoken more quickly than the idiomatic. There is certainly no doubt either that in this particular humorous context we experience a flip in interpretation from idiomatic to literal at about the same time as Homer utters (63). But the crucial question is whether something audible in (63) actually causes that flip, or whether, independently of (63), we are prompted to infer that we must flip our interpretation. Bearing in mind the introductory ‘‘No’’, and the smoke seen issuing from Homer’s ears, there could hardly be any doubt about the correct interpretation, even if the accompanying utterance were merely a repetition of (62). In fact, although it occurs at around the time that we are driven to revise our interpretation, and notwithstanding the additional word really which it contains, (63) is arguably still ditropically ambiguous. We can show this by inventing a context leading up to an utterance just like (63) but which is plainly to be interpreted idiomatically. Consider monologue (64). (64)
[I]
Though the restaurant’s very noisy I overhear enough to make it plain that the people at the next table are talking about research fund applications. Then I pick up something to do with linguistics. By the time I realise that they’re talking about experiments just like the ones I’d detailed in my grant proposal, my EARs are REALly BURNing
There can be little doubt that the final clause of (64) will be understood in the idiomatic sense ‘‘I have a very strong impression that I am being talked about’’, and that a prosodic pattern exactly like that of (63) is entirely appropriate for it. We turn now to an attested real-life example which tends to the same conclusion, namely that there are Case (i) idioms which do not lend themselves to categorical disambiguation by prosodic means. On a certain date in 2003 I participated in an official strike of university staff. On the day in question I went into a local shop at an unaccustomed time, and the shopkeeper, who sees me regularly as I travel to and from my place of work, noticed that I was not at work. The exchange was as in (65): (65)
[A]
Shopkeeper: MA: Shopkeeper:
Not at work today? No, I’m on STRIKE [Laughs]
The shopkeeper is a very polite person. She is certainly not mocking the strike, or the issue which has occasioned it. Her laughter can only indicate that she knows nothing about the strike, and that she believes that I have made a joke. She thinks that I have used the idiom to be on strike
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with its jocular meaning ‘‘to shirk unpleasant duties’’ which is encountered in exchanges such as (66): (66)
[I]
Speaker A: Speaker B:
It’s your turn to do the washing up No way. I’m on STRIKE
So (65) establishes that my utterance, repeated here as (67), is ditropically ambiguous. (67)
[A]
I’m on STRIKE
Now the crucial claim is that there is simply no prosodic manipulation which can be applied to the words of (67) so as to signal categorically that the literal meaning is intended. Although a large variety of prosodic patterns can in principle be used, they all seem to be capable of use with either of the two interpretations. By contrast, deviation from the fixed verbal form of the idiom (for example, changing X be on strike to there is a strike) would bring immediate disambiguation, as seen in (68). (68)
[I]
Shopkeeper: MA:
Not at work today? No, there’s a STRIKE
If Van Lancker and Canter (1981) were right in claiming that literal meanings are generally accompanied by a greater quantity of (undifferentiated) prosodic activity (more pauses, more pitch accents), then it ought to be possible to guide a listener towards a literal interpretation of (67) by repeating the utterance in a prosodically embellished form—maybe with pitch accents on all of the three syllables, and a pause after I as suggested in (69). (69)
[I]
\/ I’M j ON \STRIKE
Indeed it seems quite likely that if an experiment were devised in which the plain (67) and embellished version (69) were to be categorised as literal or idiomatic in a forced-choice task, a result might well be obtained in line with the Van Lancker and Canter account. But what is intuitively quite clear is that the prosodic hand-waving in (69) does not in any way categorically indicate the literal meaning; nor does it wreck the possibility of an idiomatic interpretation. What it does is to call attention to a particular stretch of utterance and invite the listener to seek an alternative interpretation to the one that the listener has evidently already made. If there is anything in this idea, we might hope in principle to be able to find contexts exhibiting the inverse of the Van Lancker and Canter effect—that is, cases where listeners are most likely to have arrived first at the literal interpretation, and where extra attention-getting prosodic activity can flip the listeners in the reverse direction to the idiomatic interpretation. In fact, innuendo or (deliberate) double-entendre would seem often to involve just this. Consider (70). (70)
[A]
Ann-Marie has been playing away from home
This was spoken by a male presenter in a radio programme concerned with music and musicians, and (as was quickly evident from the discussion, and possibly known already by regular listeners) Ann-Marie was simply a member of an orchestra which had been touring. The presenter,
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however, was making an attempt at salacious humour by selecting an expression which has an additional meaning (‘‘to engage in sexual activity outside of an established partnership’’). The joke, such as it is, is hardly more than a reminder of that other meaning. But in order to ensure that the listeners retrieved that meaning, or at least perceived the ambiguity, the presenter embellished the utterance of (70) with the prosodic ‘‘hand-waving’’ referred to above. It was spoken very slowly, with an exaggerated pitch range, and followed by what we (customarily, and revealingly) refer to as a ‘‘meaningful’’ pause. It is plain, though, that none of this prosodic activity directly signals the alternate meaning, or indeed any substantive meaning at all. What it ‘‘means’’ is something like ‘‘pay particular attention to the interpretation of this stretch; look for an interpretation other than the obvious’’. In face-to-face communication, gestures and facial expressions would almost certainly accompany and reinforce the effect. I do not think that this possible mode of interaction between prosody and interpretation has previously been named, and for want of an established name I propose to call it ‘‘nudge-nudge wink-wink’’, or NNWW for short.2 Returning to the main argument, we seem to have established that although there may be prosodic effects (such as NNWW) which impel listeners towards particular interpretations in specific contexts, there are at least some idioms of the type we have identified as Case (i) which do not permit categorical disambiguation by prosodic means. Is this just an accident? Or is it simply that these examples, merely as an accidental by-product of their composition, happen not to provide the opportunities for the type of focus manipulations which seem so destructive in examples such as (3), (6), (7) and (10)? What happens, in fact, if we attempt to put ‘‘narrow focus’’ into the strings seen in (67) or (62)? Consider (71)–(73). (71) (72) (73)
[I] [I] [I]
i’m on STRIKE i’m ON strike I’M on strike
However, prominent we attempt to make an accent on STRIKE, (71) is not distinct from (67), while (72) and (73) have the character of being ‘insisting’ or ‘contrastive’ utterances, which could be contextualised without much difficulty, but which are essentially neutral between the literal and idiomatic possibilities. Example (72) is particularly interesting, since it shows narrow focus on an element which is unquestionably ‘‘within’’ the idiom, but which does not seem to destroy the possibility of idiomatic interpretation. It provides a further category of exception to (54), and prompts us to ask whether other idioms show the same behaviour. It turns out that it is not difficult to produce contexts in which Case (i) idioms exhibit narrow focus but retain their idiomatic meaning. See (74): (74)
[I]
We always said that the supervisor had eyes in the back of her HEAD j It turns out that her replacement has eyes in the back of HER head j TOO j
2 The interpretations linked with NNWW need not necessarily be salacious (though they commonly are). The Oxford English Dictionary Online at nudge, n. 3 defines the expression nudge, nudge (wink, wink) as being ‘‘used . . . to imply cheeky, conspiratorial, or mischievous insinuation or innuendo, esp. of a sexual nature’’ and this seems also to be a reasonable characterization of the prosodic effects under discussion. The expression seems to have become current following a celebrated sketch in the television comedy series Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969).
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Clearly, the insight which (54) and (55) were attempting to capture is in need of further refinement. Sometimes, placing a narrow focus within an idiom appears to wreck the interpretation of the idiom, as in (3), (6), (7) and (10), while at other times, as in (74), exactly the same idiom tolerates the presence of a narrow focus. We have operated so far without any explicit analysis of the notion ‘idiom’. Given the practical orientation from which this work started (putting stress marks in learners’ dictionaries) idiom has to mean ‘‘anything that appears in a dictionary of idioms’’, and the psycholinguistic equivalent of that is simply ‘‘any multi-word entry in the lexicon’’. Idiom, then, has pretty much the same meaning as formula, fixed expression or collocation. Only a subset of idioms in this wider sense have the much-discussed property of ‘‘non-compositional meaning’’ (that is, a meaning which is not predictable from the separate meanings of components) and even if an idiom exhibits some non-compositional meaning, it may have other components which make an essentially straightforward contribution to meaning (see Nunberg et al., 1994). Consider (75) and (76). (75) (76)
It was raining cats and dogs John has a chip on his shoulder
In a loose sense, the idiom seen in (75) consists of some kind of association among the elements rain, cats and dogs, and that seen in (76) consists of some kind of association among the elements have, chip, on, ones’s, shoulder. But notice that (75) implies (77): (77)
It was raining
whereas (76) does not imply (78): (78)
John has a chip
So while rain is certainly a component of the idiom (i.e. formula, collocation) seen in (75) it makes a perfectly straightforward contribution to the meaning. It seems that it may be justifiable to distinguish the non-compositional part of an idiom from the rest. In this instance, for example, cats and dogs is the non-compositional part of the idiom. For the idiom seen in (76), the non-compositional part consists of chip on shoulder, while have is presumably outside the noncompositional part, and the one’s is just some kind of formal placeholder which is necessitated by the attempt to put the idiom into a ‘citation’ form for inclusion in a lexicon. The distinction between non-compositional and other parts of an idiom provides the final element we need to understand the complex pattern of results we have observed when focus distinctions of various types are applied to idioms. (79)
The prosodic manipulations that destroy idioms are precisely those which put a focus distinction into the non-compositional part of an idiom.
Collecting together and renumbering the examples used previously to illustrate a humorous or bizarre failure of idiomatic meaning, we have: (80) (81)
She has eyes in the BACK of her head It was raining cats AND dogs
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(82) (83)
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It was raining CATS and dogs John has a chip on his SHOULDer
We see that (80) attempts to put eyes and head in the background, though eyes, head and back in fact belong together in the non-compositional part of the idiom; (81) attempts to place cats in the background, while (82) attempts to place dogs in the background, when in fact both items belong in the non-compositional part of the idiom in question; and in a similar way (83) attempts to place chip in the background, whereas chip and shoulder belong together in the noncompositional part of that idiom. Narrow focus can succeed with the very same idioms, provided the focus distinction which is applied leaves any non-compositional component intact. Recall (74), part of which is repeated here slightly modified as (84). (84)
[I]
The replacement has eyes in the back of HER head
On the surface HER is located between back and head, and is therefore in a superficial sense ‘‘within’’ the non-compositional part of the idiom. But clearly there is no guarantee or requirement that the reflex of the non-compositional portion of an idiom should form a contiguous string. The element which surfaces here as her is not part of the non-compositional component of the idiom, and hence the idiomatic meaning is saved. To summarise for Case (i), we have progressed from an analysis (21) which proposed that idiosyncratic accentual information is part of the lexical entry for an idiom to an analysis in which no such information is required, the accentual behaviour of the idiom simply falling out from its meaning. But the examples in Case (ii) and Case (iii) remain as troublesome instances where apparently arbitrary prosodic marking is still needed in the lexicon. In the remaining portion of this paper I give a brief indication of how this too might be eliminated. Our Case (ii) examples were: (85) (86)
POUR down be ROLLing in money
‘‘rain heavily’’ ‘‘be very wealthy’’
There is no doubt that these differ in accentual pattern from the corresponding literal expressions. The question is whether their accentual pattern is simply arbitrary. Intuitively, it seems clear that both (85) and (86) incorporate some kind of intensification. Notice, for example, that both readily accept explicit intensifiers such as absolutely, simply, literally as in (87) and (88): (87) (88)
[I] [I]
It’s absolutely POURing down They’re simply ROLLing in money
This cannot be coincidental. Obviously much more analysis is required, but it seems likely that either (a) the accent location in (85) and (86) reflects a (hitherto undescribed) intensification process in English, or (b) that the accent location is controlled by the intensifiers seen in (87) and (88) so that when the intensifiers fail to surface, the accent pattern remains as a surrogate.
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Note that POUR down which conventionally has the sense ‘‘rain heavily’’ is also found as an intensification of the regular sense of pour DOWN. Consider (89). (89)
[I]
A pipe in the roof of the factory had fractured, and oil was simply POURing down.
If this account is along the right lines, then, the lexicon need not contain an arbitrary association between the pattern POUR down and the sense ‘‘rain heavily’’. What needs to be known, in the lexicon or elsewhere, is that there is an association between that sense and the intensified versions of certain verbs (compare CHUCK it down, BUCKET down, PISS down and many more). The intensification process itself, being a regularity, need not be in the lexicon. That leaves Case (iii), where not only the accentual pattern but even the tone choices in an idiom appear to be constrained. The arguments marshalled so far have tended to indicate that despite initial appearances, accentual patterns are probably not fixed, arbitrary properties of idioms. If that is so, it surely suggests that actual tone choice specifications are even less likely to be arbitrarily fixed. Our paradigm case was: (90)
I could eat a \HORSE
There is certainly no doubting the bizarre and humorous effect that listeners evidently experience if this phrase is spoken out of context with an inappropriate tone (such as a fall–rise) on horse. A possible explanation may be the fact is that (90) is almost always used as an exclamation. In many accents of English there is a very strong association between exclamative function and the use of a falling (or rising–falling) tone. Exclamations are never spoken with a falling–rising tone. The apparent constraint on tone choice does not operate in any special way on the expression in (90), but on any expression, idiomatic or literal, used as an exclamation. To show that this is the case, we can invent a context in which the idiom incorporated in (90) serves a different function. Warnings, for example, are typically spoken with a falling–rising pattern (that is, the very pattern which seems so odd when heard on (90) in isolation). Consider (91). (91)
[I]
It’s kind of you to let me share your sandwiches, but I’m warning you, I could eat a \/HORSE.
In this context, the fall–rise on horse seems much more acceptable. From this we conclude that the bizarre effect of (40) has nothing to do with a putative lexically specified tone, whether on horse or the expression as a whole. The effect more likely results from a frustrated interpretative process in the listener, in which the incoming stimulus has conflicted with two otherwise reliable premises (92) and (93). (92) (93)
In the absence of indications to the contrary, the expression I could eat a horse functions as an exclamation Exclamations are spoken with falling tones
This disposes of the strongest Case (iii) example I have been able to discover. There are probably numerous other examples, where a certain expression may seem to have at least a statistical preference for a particular type of tone treatment, but perhaps all can be dealt with in an analogous way. That is, the expression has a more-or-less reliable association with a particular
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utterance function, and the function in turn has a more-or-less reliable association with a particular type of tone treatment. In conclusion, we have seen that prosody interacts in a variety of ways with the interpretation of utterances which contain idioms. For practical purposes (e.g. from the perspective of a foreign learner of English) it is as if some of the prosodic properties of idioms are arbitrarily fixed. On closer analysis we find no clear evidence to support that supposition. There are certainly prosodic manipulations that play havoc with idioms, but they work not by departing from a fixed pattern specified for the idiom, but by setting the listener the perplexing puzzle of trying to impose a focus distinction between entities that are not separate meaningful items. Among other possible prosodic effects which merit further investigation are those supposedly found by Van Lancker and Canter (1981), which may reveal the correct interpretations of otherwise ambiguous utterances, without actually encoding them, and the effect we have termed NNWW, which again without encoding any specific information, signals a hint that further interpretative effort is needed. Acknowledgements I am grateful for guidance and support from Diane Blakemore and Anne Wichmann, and for the helpful comments of two anonymous referees. Thanks for ideas and information are also owing to Patricia Ashby, Robyn Carston, Jill House, Dick Hudson, Katy Mackay, John Maidment, Marco Tamburelli, Diana Van Lancker Sidtis, Rosa Vega-Moreno, John Wells and Deirdre Wilson. References Groening, Matt, 2002. The Simpsons Film Festival. 20th Century Fox F1-SGB 22279DVD. Ladd, D. Robert, 1996. Intonational Phonology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Nunberg, Geoffrey, Sag, Ivan A., Wasow, Thomas, 1994. Idioms. Language 70, 491–534. Stubbs, Michael, 2001. Words and Phrases: Corpus Studies of Lexical Semantics. Blackwell, Oxford. Titone, Debra A., Connine, Cynthia M., 1999. On the compositional and noncompositional nature of idiomatic expressions. Journal of Pragmatics 31, 1655–1674. Van Lancker, Diana, Canter, Gerald J., 1981. Idiomatic versus literal interpretations of ditropically ambiguous sentences. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 24, 64–69. Van Lancker, Diana, Canter, Gerald J., Terbeek, Dale, 1981. Disambiguation of ditropic sentences: acoustic and phonetic cues. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 24, 330–335. Wray, Alison, 2003. Formulaic Language and the Lexicon. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Michael Ashby is senior lecturer in phonetics in the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London, and phonetics editor of the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English (7th ed., 2005) together with a family of related ELT dictionaries including the Oxford Dictionary of Idioms for Learners of English (2001). His recent publications include an article ‘‘Phonetic classification’’ in Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd ed., Elsevier, 2005), and a co-authored book Introducing Phonetic Science (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
