Slippery idioms

Katja Mntyl & Hannele Dufva University of Jyvskyl, Finland In the study of formulaic expressions, much attention has been paid to how these fixed phrases are learnt and used. Though our understanding of the variety of fixed expressions has grown, and the role they play in language has been recognised, there are still areas that have not been much explored. This paper concentrates on idioms, expressions that in our definition include more than one word and have a metaphorical meaning, for instance, kill two birds with one stone. In analysing the idioms of everyday speech, it might sometimes be difficult to detect whether they have been correctly produced or whether there has been some kind of an error, mistake, unconventional usage or a slip of the tongue in the idiom since they may also inherently vary in lexis and grammar. Also, an idiom may carry several meanings that depend not only on the context but also on how language users interpret them. The fact that even though the origins of an idiom are often in some real life situation, the relationship between the literal and metaphorical meaning may be weakish, and the meaning of an idiom seem arbitrary to the language users. Also, slips of the tongue have been widely studied. However, there is less research that connects slips and idioms. An assumption that is often repeated but which is not usually substantiated by evidence rising from experimental studies or the analysis of actual data is that people make less even no - mistakes in formulaic expressions. This is often taken to refer to the fact that formulaic expressions are stored in the mental lexicon as whole patterns and/or produced in a routine fashion. Yet a variety of slips of the tongue and/or mistakes in idioms can be detected in everyday speech. In our talk, we will discuss our own data of Finnish slips of the tongue in idioms. We will discuss examples of the data with the aim of illustrating some of the ambiguities in defining and classifying these slips. To add, we report the results of an experiment of how listeners detect slips of the tongue in idioms. Finally, we relate our findings to the psycholinguistic theorizing of formulaic expressions. .