LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Unravelling Urdu Idioms

Abrar Hussain Qureshi, Ph.D. Candidate

Introduction

Urdu is rich in idiomatic expressions. This research paper makes a contribution to the description of Urdu idioms. It describes the key syntactic, semantic, grammatical, etc. features that govern the formation and use of idioms in Urdu.

Idioms cover a core part in any lexicon. Description of idioms across the languages is not a new phenomenon. Contributions by Palmer (1933), Hockett (1958) and Malkiel's (1959) detailed description of "binomials" and his doctoral thesis (1972) were useful contributions to the study of idiomaticity. Alexander (1984, 1987), Sinclair (1991), MacCarthy (1992, 1998), and Moon (1998) also described idioms from different perspectives.

Idiom Principle

In his "Idiom Principle," Sinclair (1991) states that words tend to cluster together in systematic ways. We have already seen this in the collocational patterning of words. But sometimes the patterning becomes so regular that the resulting cluster seems to be more than simply words with collocational ties. Rather, the words take on aspects of a single entity, that is, a string of words acts as single lexemes with a single meaning. When this happens, those lexemes are called "multiword units". There are a great variety of multiword units. Idioms are one of them.

Definition of Idiom

Dubrovin (1995) defines "idiom" to be a set of phraseological units which meaning does not result from the meaning of its components. The definition by Dean Curry (1994) is "the assigning of a new meaning to a group of words which already have their own meaning". Moon (1998) notes that idioms are typically institutionalized, lexico-grammatically fixed and non-compositional expressions. Collins (2000) defines idioms as a group of words, which have a different meaning when used together from the one it would have if the meaning of each word were taken individually and that are usually employed in everyday language to precisely express ideas and concepts that cannot be compressed into a single word. Moreover, to complicate things further, within each of these subclasses, every idiom has its own syntactic, semantic and pragmatic configuration.

The Notion of Semantic Constituent In Aid of the Definition of Idiom

Fortunately, it is possible to define an idiom precisely and non-circularly using the notion of semantic constituent. We shall require two things of an idiom: first, that it should be lexically complex, i.e., it should consist of more than one lexical constituent; second, that it should be a single minimal semantic constituent."

Characteristics of Idioms

From this point of view, all idioms are elementary lexical units. It is interesting that although idioms consist of more than one word; they display to some extent the sort of internal cohesion that we expect of single words. For instance, they typically resist interruption and re-ordering of parts. Some of the restriction of syntactic potential of idioms is semantically motivated.

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