LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 9 : 6 June 2009
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         K. Karunakaran, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.

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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.


This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.


Crosstalk and Communication Breakdown in Professional Interactions in English | Phonological, Grammatical and Lexical Interference in Adult Multilingual Speakers | Politeness Strategies in Yemeni Arabic Requests | Unravelling Urdu Idioms | The Roots of Linguistic Reorganization of Indian States - The Experience of Orissa as a Linguistic Province in the British Raj | Characteristic Indian Attitudes in Nissim Ezekiel's Poetry | Teaching Language through Literary Texts in the ESL Classroom | The Semantics of Haroti Postpositional-Interrogating Simple Sentences | The Politics of Survival in the Novels of Margaret Atwood - A Doctoral Dissertation | Teaching Technical Jargon through Word Formation to the Students of Engineering and Technology | Indian Spirituality and Twice-Born Nature - A Study of Eliot's Approach to World | Discourse Choices in Pluralistic Nations - A Review of Maya Khemlani David-edited Language Choices and Discourse of Malaysian Families | Exploring the Effectiveness of World Wide Web
to Improve the Communication Skills of Management Students - A Pilot Study
| HOME PAGE of June 2009 Issue | HOME PAGE | CONTACT EDITOR


Abrar Hussain Qureshi, Ph.D. Candidate
Government College (Boys)
Mian Chuunu
Pakistan
abrarqureshi74f@hotmail.com

 
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