Rit (Vísindafélag Íslendinga) - 01.06.1970, Page 280

278
are idioms which look like normal surface structures of the
language. The meaning-rule approach, on the other hand,
limits the syntactic form of the idioms in a language by
requiring that idioms should be generated by the regular
syntactic rules, and hence have the form of normal phrases.
I think that this prediction is on the whole correct, and in any
case far closer to the truth than the subtree-listing theory.
Some exceptions exist, like to come a cropper, but these seem to be
actually understood as deviant versions of normal phrases
(e.g., in this example, come is understood as become). If this
is the case, then the extra power inherent in the idiom list
approach is doing no good, and hence doing harm, so that
the more restricted meaning-rule approach seems preferable.
One class of idioms must surely in any case be treated in this
way: metaphorical expressions such as fish in troubled waters,
break X’s heart, stab X in the back. I would argue that the
difference between them and regular idioms is a matter of
degree, and that a unified treatment of them all in terms of
meaning rules is workable.
There has been in recent years a little revival of the pro-
blem whether lexical classes such as noun, verb, adjective
have any semantic characteristics. The full ‘medieval’ view
that they are semantic categories, recently taken up again by
Weinreich (1966), is surely too strong. It is clearly not true,
e.g., that all verbs refer to actions and all adjectives refer to
states. The basic meaning of he’s cold is just the same as that
of hanfryser. But what does seem to be the case is that semantic
extension rules are sensitive to lexical categorization, so that
words of one class may be prone to develop derived meanings
which their synonyms in another class do not get. While han
fryser and he’s cold mean the same thing, there is the difference
between them that frysa, evidently because it is a verb, is
open to a meaning extension not available to the adjective
cold. It fits into many contexts which require actions rather
than states: cf. hon fick frysa dárute medan dom letade efter nyckeln,
but ungrammatical *she had to be cold outside while they were