The final publication is available at Mouton de Gruyter

In: Sandra Handl, Hans-Jörg Schmid (eds.). Windows to the

mind: metaphor, metonymy and conceptual blending. Berlin,
New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2011, 41-62. (= Cognitive
Linguistics Research, 48).
The final publication is available at
The structure of metaphor and idiom semantics (a
cognitive approach)

Dmitrij Dobrovol’skij

1. Theoretical prerequisites

The main postulate of cognitive linguistics, from which all its methods and
heuristics can be derived, is the idea that there are conceptual structures
standing behind the linguistic structures and that, therefore, investigation
into linguistic structures has to involve addressing relevant conceptual
structures (cf., for example, Talmy 2000; Croft and Cruse 2004). This ba-
sic assumption is what distinguishes the cognitive approach from other dir-
ections of linguistic research.
From a theoretical point of view some questions arise in connection
with the idea of the relevance of knowledge structures corresponding to lin-
guistic facts under consideration.

1. How is it possible to analyze knowledge structures independently

from language?
2. How can the explanations involving knowledge structures be veri-
fied?
3. What metalanguages have to be developed in order to be able to take
into account relevant conceptual structures?
4. How can cognitively oriented results be properly embedded in lin-
guistic descriptions?
5. In which domains of linguistic research is the use of cognitive meth-
ods especially promising?

As for the first two questions, they cannot be answered in the frame-
work of linguistics. To be able to investigate conceptual structures and to
verify assumptions about their features relevant to language functioning
one has to address disciplines other than linguistics and to use methods of
psychological empirical research. Even in this case, questions of this nature
can be answered only in part because the concepts are not directly access-
ible. However, the last three questions can reasonably be answered within
the scope of linguistics. This paper is to be regarded as a contribution to
answering the question as to how to include results of cognitively oriented
idiom research in their purely linguistic descriptions, or how can linguistic
semantics and syntax profit from cognitive findings.
The paper discusses the phenomenon of semantic analyzability of
idioms – with its cognitive foundations – as the conceptual basis for some
specific features of their discursive behaviour. This phenomenon is one of
the central issues in cognitively oriented idiom research because it is re-
lated to the structure of the underlying metaphor and therefore to the con-
ceptual basis of idiom semantics.

2. Semantic analyzability of idioms: general issues

The structure of the metaphor underlying idiom semantics is related to the

notions of semantic analyzability or decomposability, which have fre-
quently been debated, also outside of cognitive linguistics. See, e.g., (Ra-
jxštejn 1980; Dobrovol’skij 1982, 1997, 2000, 2004; Wasow, Sag, and
Nunberg 1983; Gibbs, Nayak, and Cutting 1989; Geeraerts and Bakema
1993; Geeraerts 1995; Nunberg, Sag, and Wasow 1994; Dobrovol’skij and
Piirainen 1997, 2005; Keil 1997; Titone and Connine 1999; Abel 2003;
Langlotz 2003). Analyzable idioms are expressions in which certain con-
stituents have more or less autonomous meanings in the scope of the lexi-
calized fidurative meaning, 1 cf. to throw the baby out with the bath (water)
‘to destroy what is good or important about a situation by mistake while
trying to change and improve it’. This idiom can be considered to be ana-
lyzable or decomposable: autonomous meanings can be ascribed to baby
(meaning roughly ‘the good’), throw out (‘get rid of’) and bath water (‘a
substance not needed anymore’). In this case, we are dealing with a type of
homomorphism between the structure of the lexicalized meaning and the
structure of the underlying metaphor. Homomorphism of this nature is cog-
nitively real; it means that the speakers who know this idiom are able to as-
sociate its constituent parts with the corresponding parts of its lexicalized
meaning. This leads to the analyzability or decomposability of such expres-
sions including the impact on their discursive behaviour; cf. possible syn-
tactic transformations such as that was the baby that was thrown out with
the bath water. A certain freedom in the discursive behaviour of idioms,
including alterations of their lexical and syntactic structure, is typically

1
This semantic structure can also be called actual meaning. In what follows, I
will use these terms as synonyms.
considered to be the main argument in favour of their semantic analyzabil-
ity, i.e. semantic autonomy of their constituent parts; compare, e.g., (Wa-
sow, Sag, and Nunberg 1983: 108).
Discussing notions like semantic analyzability, decomposition, idio-
matic combinations etc. we have to bear in mind that they are, so to speak,
of secondary nature, i.e. all these terms refer to semantic autonomy ex post
factum. To be able to handle an idiom as a “combining expression” or an
“idiomatic combination” (cf. Nunberg, Sag, and Wasow 1994) the speakers
have to know the lexicalized meaning of a given idiom, i.e. the knowledge
of the overall meaning of the idiom is the mandatory prerequisite for
ascribing quasi-autonomous meanings to its constituents. These quasi-
autonomous meanings of the idiom constituents are obviously not identical
with their literal meanings.
Further English idioms displaying semantic analyzability are to grasp
the nettle, to pull strings, to spill the beans, to let the cat out of the bag, to
keep/juggle the balls in the air, to cross one’s bridges before one has come
to them. Some linguists believe that most idioms behave in this way; cf.,
for instance, (Wasow, Sag, and Nunberg 1983: 109): “we claim that pieces
of an idiom typically have identifiable meanings which combine to produce
the meaning of the whole”. The question remains open whether the idioms
are typically analyzable or rather typically holistic, i.e. non-decomposable
semantically. In order to answer this question, additional empirical data
from a wide range of languages is needed. One point is clear: just as with
many other linguistic phenomena, the analyzability of idiom semantics is a
matter of degree. In many cases, the judgement of idiom analyzability is
individually or contextually based, i.e. it differs from person to person 1 and
from context to context. Thus, it often makes no sense to argue over the is-
sue whether a certain individual idiom is decomposable or not. What is im -
portant is the fact that if I perceive an idiom as being analyzable I will
modify it in my discourse in a way similar to to throw the baby out with
the bath (water). If another speaker disagrees with this view this speaker
would not modify this given idiom in such a way. Anyway, in many cases
most speakers would agree in their judgements about the idiom analyzabil-
ity. So, e.g., given the fact that it is not possible to ascribe more or less
autonomous meanings to the constituents of English idioms such as to go
west, to bite the dust, to have something at one’s fingertips, to stick one’s
neck out, to rattle someone’s cage, to split hairs, to come a cropper. These
idioms are non-analyzable, at least in a linguistically relevant sense. It
means that they do not allow alterations which are acceptable with idioms
like to throw the baby out with the bath (water). This does not mean that
the constituents of such idioms have no autonomous status whatsoever
from a purely psychological point of view. Nor does this mean that non-
analyzable idioms do not undergo playful variation in puns and jokes.
What is crucial for our further discussion is that these idioms are not sub-
ject to more or less regular syntactic transformations and adaptations in
conventional speech, i.e. outside playing on words, and that their constitu-
ent parts do not show any clear correlation with the parts of their lexical-
ized meaning, hence are not autonomous with regard to lexical semantics.
Different views on the notion of semantic autonomy will be discussed in
some more detail in section 3.
There are several reasons for the growing interest in the notion of se-
mantic analyzability. First of all, this phenomenon is theoretically challen-
ging. As is well known, the traditional “school-grammar” view of idioms,
as well as their generative treatment is based on the idea of their total non-
compositionality (cf. widespread metaphor “idioms as long words” or the
generativist definition of idioms as “anomalies of interpretation”). The fact
that some idioms behave as lexical units with structural parts which are
more or less autonomous semantically demands rethinking of many cat-
egories established in idiom research.
Second, there is some empirical evidence that the constraints on syn-
tactic alterations of a given idiom partly depend on the degree of its se-
mantic analyzability. The notion of semantic analyzability therefore gets a
certain operational value or, at least, an explanatory potential for research
on idiom syntax. As for cognitive linguistics, it regards this phenomenon
as one of the most crucial aspects of idiom semantics. There are psycholin -
guistic findings which show that the speakers process analyzable idioms in
a different way than the non-analyzable ones, including their syntactic be-
haviour (cf., e.g., Gibbs and Nayak 1989).
The question which idioms are to be considered analyzable and why
cannot be answered at the level of linguistic structures. Phenomena of this
kind are obviously conceptual by nature. The decisive criterion here is the
structure of the underlying metaphor (cf. Dobrovol’skij 2000). In this pa-
per, I briefly discuss some specific features of the discursive behaviour of
idioms with regard to their analyzability, the possibility of applying some
operational criteria in this field, essential cognitive foundations of this phe-
nomenon, above all, the internal structure of the underlying metaphor, and
the relationships between semantic analyzability and motivation.
3. Discursive behaviour of analyzable idioms

The crucial question for the theory of phraseology is whether or not the in-
ternal semantic structure of an idiom influences its discursive behaviour,
including its ability to participate in syntactic transformations. If so, then a
powerful explanatory tool can be developed, namely that the degree of
idiom semantic analyzability (on condition that it can be measured more or
less objectively) would be able to predict or, at least, to explain what kinds
of discursive alterations are applicable to a given idiom. If not, then the no-
tion of semantic analyzability itself appears to be of little value for lin-
guistic research. Why should we develop a new category with its relevant
criteria if it cannot be used for predicting or explaining empirical data?
The answer as to the question of discursive relevance of analyzability
depends on how we define this notion. In the literature on idiom research,
the following three views of this concept can be found. First, it has been re-
peatedly stressed that the idioms have their internal syntactic structure. In
other words, idioms are not “long words” which have to be embedded into
sentences as a whole but undergo the mandatory morphosyntactic adapta-
tions, which make them fit in the sentence structure, i.e. “they never func-
tion as a lexical unit, i.e. they are not inserted as a unit at any one point of de-
rivation” (Newmeyer 1974: 339). This is self-evident and does not help to
correlate the degree of discursive freedom with the degree of analyzability.
In this case, not the semantic, but the purely syntactic analyzability is at is-
sue. Just the same as semantically decomposiable idioms such as to throw
the baby out with the bath (water), to keep tabs or to pull strings,2 most
non-decomposable expressions undergo systematic (i.e. standard) morpho-
syntactic operations or inflectional variations, which are normal for their
word-class and necessary to meet the embedding conditions. Verbs, for ex-
ample, can be marked by a particular person, tense, and the like. Compare:
X will bite the dust / would bite the dust / has bitten the dust; he bites / they
bite the dust etc.
Second, the analyzability of an idiom, and therefore the “semantic au-
tonomy” of its constituents can be understood in the sense that they con-
tribute semantically to its overall meaning (cf. Cacciari and Glucksberg
1991). In most cases, this is an incontrovertible fact, but has no relevance
for the discursive behaviour of a given idiom, at least with regard to issues
under discussion. The contribution of the particular constituents to the lex-
icalized meaning manifests itself, among others, in the fact that general se-
mantico-syntactic properties of the verb-constituents (such as aspect or Ak-
tionsart) are inherited by the overall figurative meaning of the idiom. So,
kicking the bucket does not denote the situation of a slow death (Hamblin
and Gibbs 1999); cf. also (Tronenko 2003) based on Russian data.
Furthermore, the semantic role of particular constituents can be shown
while comparing idioms from various languages that are semantically sim-
ilar, but not identical. The German idiom Eulen nach Athen tragen lit. “to
carry owls to Athens” and the Russian idiom exat’ v Tulu so svoim samo-
varom lit. “to go to Tula with their own samovar”, meaning nearly the
same as the English idiom to carry coals to Newcastle, display significant
differences in their combinatorial properties. The Russian idiom can com-
bine with words denoting human beings in the position of direct object.
That is, if one can take someone to a place where there are already many
people of this kind, this idiom can be used as an ironic comment on this ac-
tion. The German idiom cannot be used in this combinatorial surrounding.
The reason for it seems to be that the verb tragen “to carry”, taken in its lit-
eral meaning, prevents this kind of direct object: normally one does not
carry other people from place to place. The verb exat’ s “to go with”, al-
lows for the interpretation in the sense ‘to take somebody somewhere with
you’. This example demonstrates that semantic properties of particular con-
stituents can (but, of course, must not) have impact on the combinatorial
profile of the idiom in question.
Another fact demonstrating the relevance of the content plane of single
constituents for the actual meaning is the stylistic sensitivity of idioms to-
wards their constituents. Idioms with vulgar words in their lexical structure
are always perceived as vulgar, even if there is nothing vulgar in their lex-
icalized meaning. On the contrary, idioms with old-fashioned, formal or
poetic constituents are normally perceived as belonging to the correspond-
ing stylistic levels.
Such a view on analyzability is often called the “compositional ap-
proach”, meaning that it emphasises the fundamental ability of idiom con-
stituents to contribute to the overall meaning. One version of this view is
presented by Titone and Connine (1999) who propose a model of idiom
representation and processing that ascribes non-compositional and compos-
itional characteristics to idioms. In this view, idiomatic expressions func-
tion simultaneously as semantically arbitrary word sequences and composi-
tional phrases. Similar to the aforementioned “syntactic” view on analyzab-
ility, the “compositional approach” does not help to answer the question
whether or not the internal semantic structure of an idiom influences its
discursive behaviour.
 What would be much more helpful from the perspective of idiom syntax
is the view on analyzability that would allow us to explain why certain
idioms resist standard transformations and adaptations while others do not.
Why can we say the beans have been spilt, but not *the bucket has been
kicked? Intuitively it is obvious that the speakers address semantic proper-
ties of idioms to understand that *the bucket has been kicked3 and the like
is senseless whereas utterances such as the beans have been spilt make
sense, rather than they learn lists of possible alterations for every idiom.
The theory of idioms has to develop means for describing this kind of se-
mantic intuition. In this case, the reason is that the word bucket from the
idiom to kick the bucket does not allow for the concrete-referential use
while the word beans from the idiom to spill the beans does. The passiviz-
ation in English in standard usage is communicatively reasonable only in
those cases where the noun phrase that is moved into the subject position,
and by so doing topicalized, is a meaningful constituent of the sentence
structure.4 Since it is so the idiom parts that are moved from object to sub-
ject, or undergo topicalization, clefting, adnominal modification and the
like must be meaningful parts of the idiom structure, at least to a certain
extent. The speakers seem to have rather clear intuition about this issue,
that is to say, they feel in which cases idiom constituents are meaningful,
i.e. semantically autonomous, and in which cases they are meaningless (not
in the sense that they do not contribute to the overall meaning or that they
are “no words” morphosyntactically, but in the sense that they are not relat-
ively autonomous semantic entities). To put it another way, idioms such as
to kick the bucket, on the one hand, and to spill the beans, on the other, dis-
play significant differences not only in their discursive behaviour, but also
in their internal semantic structures. It is reasonable to assume that the se-
mantics is the trigger for their syntactic behaviour, and not vice versa.
Thus, the notion of semantic analyzability that is based on the idea of se-
mantic quasi-autonomy of particular idiom constituents seems to be a use-
ful theoretical instrument for explaining not only the discursive behaviour
of idioms, but also the speakers’ background intuition.
This view of analyzability is favoured by many linguists working in the
field of idiom research regardless of their involvement in cognitively ori-
ented research communities. Compare the typical argumentation in (Nun-
berg, Sag, and Wasow 1994: 504):
To say that an idiom is an idiomatically combining expression is to say
that the conventional mapping from literal to idiomatic interpretation is
homomorphic with respect to certain properties of the interpretations of
 the idiom’s components. In the case of an idiom like pull strings, this is
quite easy to see: the literal situation-type involves a pulling activity and
an affected object that is a set of strings. The idiomatic situation-type that
this is mapped to involves a different activity, but one that preserves cer -
tain properties of pulling, and an affected object that participates in the
idiomatic activity in a way that is similar in certain key respects to the
way strings are pulled.
What remains unclear in this description is the idea of the similarity of
situation-types. What is the difference between semantically motivated but
not analyzable idioms, such as to stick one’s neck out, and semantically
analyzable idioms like to pull strings? Both display a certain degree of
similarity between the situation-type described by the idiom’s lexical struc-
ture taken literally and the situation-type denoted by the actual meaning.
For more detail about this issue see section 4.
The idioms that are considered to be analyzable in the sense of homo-
morphism between their lexical and semantic structure regularly participate
in syntactic transformations such as passivization; compare the following
examples found in the Internet.

(1) “So I hear you are moving your factory to China,” I said. Ted’s eyes
bulged out in a way I had never seen before as he asked, “who told you
that?” Laughing pretty hard, I choked out, “your boss.” Ted just shook
his head, speechless. The big secret was out and the beans had been spilt
by the main man himself.
(2) I continued to write about my life [...]. Married and the father of two
small children, I was never home, drunk a good deal of the time, and ap-
parently felt it necessary to sleep with every waitress in North America
and The British Isles. But guess what? All these beans have also been
spilt in song.
(3) Fonteyn’s private life, however, remained private, even when she pub-
lished her autobiography. She belonged to an earlier age of discretion, as
did her great friend and admirer, Leslie Edwards. No beans spilt in his
book.

It is obvious that in all these examples the constituents spill and beans
possess a certain semantic autonomy. In (1) the context explicitly relates
the beans to the big secret, and had been spilt to was out. In (2) the con-
stituent beans is modified by all these; the effect is that beans gets a con-
crete-referential status. In (3) the word beans appears in the scope of nega-
tion, which is only possible with meaningful constituents. Semantic auton-
omy of idiom parts such as beans becomes especially evident in contexts
with focussing, profiling function, i.e. in contexts where they are modified
by relative clauses, possessive or demonstrative pronouns, and the like; cf.
(4).

(4) They spilled the beans and gave up the gory details. As a listener, you
felt you were getting something at its source, something simple, direct,
and easy to identify with because, it turns out, their beans were not un-
like your own. Everybody has pretty much the same gory details, which
is why autobiography, and art, for that matter, work.

It seems that for a constituent to be systematically modified in the dis-

course it is necessary that this constituent not only has a certain potential
semantic autonomy, but also a clear referential status. Compare sentences
(5) and (6) taken from (Fellbaum 1993: 285).

(5) John spilled the beans (about his girlfriend).

(6) John spilled the beans that his girlfriend once worked for the CIA.

Fellbaum points out that (5) is much more acceptable than (6). The rea-
son is that the beans must refer to a secret whose existence and contents are
known to the discourse participants. In (6) the contents of the secret is
made known to the listeners after the idiom is already used, which makes
this sentence sound odd. To put it differently, not only the knowledge
about potential semantic analyzability of this idiom is a part of its content
plane, but also the knowledge that its noun-constituent is preferably used in
concrete-referential function.
The approach to the description of the systematic discursive behaviour
of idioms as an epiphenomenon of their internal semantic structure is con-
vincingly advocated in (Langlotz 2003). “The systematic lexicogrammat-
ical behaviour of idioms can be explained in terms of the speaker's ability
to manipulate an idiomatic construction to make it fulfil its cognitive mod-
eling function in an efficient way” (Langlotz 2003: 463). Investigating the
discursive behaviour of English idioms in relation to their analyzability, he
points to some important restrictions. Above all, only systematic syn-
tactical operations are subject to these generalizations. That is, all possible
ad hoc manipulations with idioms do not have to depend on their internal
semantic structures (cf. in this regard also Dobrovol’skij 1997 as well as
footnote 3 in the present paper). This is the first restriction that we have to
bear in mind when looking for regularities in the field of idiom variability.
 The second restriction concerns the communicative structure of the con-
text in question (cf. examples (5) and (6) discussed above). If there is no
communicative need for a given transformation or adaptation it cannot be
implemented, even if the idiom is potentially able to undergo this altera-
tion. For example, in order to passivize an idiom we need not only se-
mantic and structural prerequisites within the idiom itself, but also contex-
tual conditions which make it communicatively necessary to remove the
focus of attention from the Agent, and maybe to profile the Patient or
Theme (see for more detail Dobrovol’skij 2001).
The third restriction is usage based by nature. Some idioms resist cer-
tain syntactic operations even if they are in principle possible. For ex-
ample, although contexts such as (1) to (3) easily can be found, it is much
more typical of the idiom to spill the beans to be used as an active. Com-
pare Moon’s (1998: 109) comment on this issue: “There may indeed be se-
mantic motivations here, but phraseological patterning also plays a part.
Cases like spill the beans show a strong fossilization in an active structure,
irrespective of potential passives and deep semantics.” Thus, not only the
internal semantic structure of idioms with their underlying conceptual
backgrounds is decisive for their discursive behaviour, but also usage
routines and discourse preferences.
From what has been said so far, the semantic analyzability of idioms is
not a sufficient condition for their systematic discursive variation.
Moreover, it is also not a necessary condition. There are syntactic opera-
tions which are not bound to the semantic analyzability. Compare the dis-
tinction between operations on meaningful expressions (control and topic-
alization, clefting, adnominal modification and the like) and meaningless
operations (such as raising or verb-second) made by Schenk (1992: 104).
Schenk advocates the view that idioms, in principle, are unable to undergo
meaningful operations. This appears to be overgeneralization that contra-
dicts the empirical data, but still the distinction between these two kinds of
operations remains relevant to idioms. Whereas for meaningful operations
it is necessary that idioms be analyzable, meaningless operations can be
implemented also with non-analyzable idioms. Especially, if the idiom as a
whole is involved in the syntactic operation there are no constraints going
back to its internal semantic structure.
This issue becomes even more complicated when other languages are
involved in the analysis. The same syntactic operation can in one language
be stronger semantically grounded and less in another. For instance, object
fronting or verb-second have different semantic value in English and Ger-
man. Compare the profound semantic differences between English topical-
ization and German scrambling.
To sum up, knowing that a given idiom is semantically analyzable resp.
non-analyzable, it is not possible to predict its discursive behaviour. What
can be assumed is only that the internal semantic structure allows for separ-
ation of idiom parts as more or less autonomous pieces and for implement-
ation of the syntactic operations on them which should be applicable to
autonomous constituents of a given syntactic structure. It is impossible to
make concrete predictions about individual operations on individual idioms
because, on the one hand, there are other factors also influencing their dis-
cursive behaviour, and on the other, idiom variability in the discourse is
heterogeneous by nature.
An additional problem goes back to differences in idiom processing by
individual speakers. Since idiom variability depends on idiom representa-
tion, a given idiom cannot be unequivocally regarded as being equally vari-
able for all speakers. This makes the implementation of whatever opera-
tional criteria in this field extremely difficult.
What cognitive semantics can offer in this field is only a more or less
reasonable heuristics for predicting the scope of variation for large groups
of idioms, and for ruling out certain alteration types. However, the most ef-
ficient contribution offered by cognitive semantics to phraseological theory
in the field of idiom discursive behaviour lies in its explanatory rather than
its predictive potential.
This explanatory potential can be realised only if the very notion of se-
mantic analyzability is understood as a conceptual property of a given
idiom based on homomorphism between its lexical and semantic structure
(and not in the sense of its syntactic transparency nor in the sense that
single constituents usually contribute semantically to its overall meaning).
The interpretation of idiom semantic analyzability which goes back to the
idea of relevant homomorphism is favoured here. The implementation of
this view on analyzability presupposes addressing the metaphoric founda-
tion of the idiom’s figurative meaning because the structure of the underly-
ing metaphor is responsible for the conceptual relationship between the
lexically fixed word-chain and its actual meaning, i.e. between what is said
and what is meant by a given idiom.
4. Semantic analyzability, metaphor structure and motivation

To be able to efficiently implement the notion of semantic analyzability we

need to find criteria to discriminate between analyzable and non-analyzable
idioms, at least, approximately, bearing in mind that operational criteria
stricto sensu are difficult to establish. It is obvious that certain lexical and
syntactic alterations, such as modification of an idiom constituent by a pos-
sessive or demonstrative pronoun or its topicalization, clearly indicate its
semantic autonomy. Such instruments can be used for quasi-operational
purposes, but implementing such criteria would be essentially circular. If
we derive the systematic discursive behaviour of idioms from their internal
semantic structures, then the relevant variations cannot be seen to be the
source of semantic analyzability (Dobrovol’skij 2004). Hence, semantic
analyzability as a conceptually grounded entity must be separated from
syntactic properties.
In the early literature on semantic analyzability attempts can be found to
bind the internal semantic structure to the structure of the definition of the
idiom meaning. The problem is that the same idiom can be defined in very
different ways. This means that a homomorphous definition, such as to
spill the beans ≈ ‘to divulge the information’ where to spill clearly correl-
ates with ‘to divulge’, and the beans with ‘the information’, has to be re-
garded as an artefact of linguistic description having no ontological status.
The correct way to deal with this phenomenon is to address the underly-
ing conceptual structure, i.e. the mental image standing behind the lexical-
ized meaning. If the structure of the underlying metaphor homomorphically
correlates with the structure of the situation-type, fixed in the lexicalized
meaning, the idiom in question is semantically analyzable. This theory on
the nature of semantic analyzability was proposed in (Dobrovol’skij 2000,
2004). Compare a similar view in (Geeraerts 1995) and (Geeraerts and
Bakema 1993) where semantic analyzability is described as the result of a
conceptual projection, or (Langlotz 2003).
Consider the idiom to let the cat out of the bag. The underlying meta-
phor seems to be transparent to most speakers. The motivation is based not
only on the overall mapping of the situation-type fixed in the lexical struc-
ture on the actual meaning, which can roughly be defined as ‘to disclose a
secret’. There are obvious associations between the part of the metaphor
expressed by the noun cat and the part of the actual meaning ‘secret’. Till
the moment highlighted in the lexical structure the cat was kept in a bag.
This knowledge structure from the source frame corresponds to the know-
ledge structure of the target frame: 5 ‘the secret was kept’. Then the cat
(usually unintentionally) was let out of the bag, i.e. ‘the secret (usually un-
intentionally) was disclosed’.
Thus, the structure of the underlying metaphor is homomorphic (partly
isomorphic) with the structure of the lexicalized meaning. The correspond-
ences between these two conceptual structures explain why the noun cat is
semantically autonomous while the noun bag is not. The quasi-autonom-
ous status of the cat ‘a hidden piece of information to a hitherto unwitting
third party’ can be demonstrated by the following contextual examples
found in the Internet.

(7) This French cat’s out of the bag. There’s something irresistible about be-
ing in on a secret [...]. The same holds true for film music. It’s im-
mensely satisfying to savor a great score before most people know about
its talented composer. But such possessiveness is sure to be short-lived,
for nothing can keep a lid on real talent for long. Certainly that’s the
case with Alexandre Desplat, whose sublime scores for “Girl With a
Pearl Earring” (2003) and “Birth” (2004) attracted widespread attention
among aficionados.
(8) The Israeli cat is out of the bag. One of Ariel Sharon’s closest advisers,
in fact, his former chief of staff, Dov Weisglass, has revealed to the Is-
raeli newspaper Haaretz the ulterior motives behind Sharon’s unilateral
decision to withdraw from the Gaza Strip.
(9) Letting the Radical Islamist Cat Out of the Bag. May 6, 2005 – A state-
ment posted by the purported deputy of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Abdel-
Rahman al-Iraqi, very possibly may have completely redefined the War
on Terror. It was such a slip of the tongue that one has to wonder
whether or not Abu will be allowed to keep his after Abu Musab al Zar-
qawi gets his hands on him.

In contexts (7) to (9) the constituent cat takes modifiers which show its
concrete-referential status. Moreover, these modifiers interact semantically
not only with the part of the lexicalized meaning expressed by the word
cat, but also with the corresponding part of the underlying metaphor. The
role of the metaphor structure becomes especially obvious in contexts such
as (10) where the writer elaborates on the image component of this idiom.

(10) Nikon Coolpix SQ: The cat takes another step out of the bag? Thus far,
though, we’ve seen only speculation as to specifications from readers
and in forums and newsgroups - nothing official has been released by
Nikon, and none of the websites we’ve seen have posted anything bey-
ond what was in the leaked Shockwave teaser files. If you’ll pardon the
 corruption of the cliche, the cat has poked its head out of the bag, but it
hasn’t really come out yet.

Although creative variations of this kind are not systematic by nature

and cannot be used as evidence in favour of semantic analyzability of
idioms or in favour of semantic autonomy of their parts (see section 3), this
example shows how the underlying metaphor works. The situation de-
scribed by the metaphor (source frame) includes the action of ‘letting out’
with its three participants:

(a) Agent – the person who ‘lets the cat out of the bag’,
(b) Patient – ‘the cat’, and
(c) Container – ‘the bag’.

This structure allows for operations such as removing the Agent and
promoting the Patient into the subject position. Then the cat, like in (10),
starts working actively. The understanding of such contexts is guaranteed
by people’s ability to relate the participants of the source-situation with the
participants of the situation denoted by the lexicalized meaning (target
frame).
It has to be stressed that the domain of relevant correspondences is con-
ceptual by nature, i.e. what correlates is, strictly speaking, not the lexical
structure (word chain) and the lexicalized meaning, but two conceptual
structures: source frame and target frame. The participants of the target
frame are:

(i) Agent – the person who ‘discloses the secret’,

(ii) Theme – ‘a hidden piece of information to a hitherto unwitting
third party’, and
(iii) Experiencer – ‘the third party’.

While being mapped, the source and the target display partial corres-
pondences. The Agent of the source corresponds to the Agent of the target,
the Patient to the Theme, but participant-slot (c) of the source frame (Con -
tainer) has no corresponding participant-slot in the target frame. The same
about participant (iii) of the target frame (Experiencer).

(a) → (i)
(b) → (ii)
(c) does not map onto (iii)
 This is the reason why to let the cat out of the bag has no addressee-
valency, and why the bag is not semantically autonomous whereas the cat
is. Strictly speaking, the constituent the cat does not correspond to the idea
of a secret, but the concept ‘the cat in the bag’, which is not expressed on
the lexical level. Therefore, it would be wrong to claim that the word cat is
fully autonomous. Here we are rather dealing with a partial correspondence
of secondary nature, and it is more correct to speak in this regard about ho-
momorphism and not about isomorphism.
To say that the structure of the underlying metaphor homomorphically
correlates with the structure of the lexicalized meaning is to say that the
participants of the source frame (partly) correspond with the participants of
the target frame. In this case we are dealing with analyzable idioms. If the
source frame is mapped on the target frame as a whole, and their lexically
expressed participant-slots cannot be put into reasonable correspondences
to each other, the idiom is perceived as being non-analyzable. However,
the idiom may be also well motivated in this case. This leads us to the next
issue, namely the relationship between analyzability and motivation.
Some cognitively oriented studies equate the motivation of an idiom
with the analyzability of its semantic structure (compare, e.g., Gibbs 1990).
However, the motivation of an idiom does not necessarily result from its
analyzability. Motivation presupposes conceptual links between source and
target whereas analyzability addresses their structural properties. There are
many idioms which are not semantically analyzable, and yet they are mo-
tivated, cf. to rattle someone’s cage ‘to do something that annoys or fright-
ens someone; to make someone angry, usually deliberately’.
This idiom is not analyzable since its constituents rattle and cage are
associated neither with meaningful parts of the underlying metaphor nor
with the parts of the target frame. Nevertheless this idiom is motivated be-
cause the sense encoded in its lexical structure provides a clear basis for its
actual meaning, ‘as if one were sitting in a cage like a bird and somebody
else rattled the bird’s cage’. One of the consequences would be that the
bird would become annoyed or frightened.
Thus, non-analyzable idioms can be motivated. But can also unmotiv-
ated, i.e. semantically opaque idioms be analyzable? Different answers to
this question can be found in linguistic studies (cf., among others, Geer-
aerts and Bakema 1993; Geeraerts 1995; Nunberg, Sag, and Wasow 1994;
Keil 1997). The general impression is that the differences in this regard are
due to the differences in the interpretation of either motivation or analyzab-
ility. Compare the view that is advocated in (Nunberg, Sag, and Wasow
1994: 497) according to which analyzable idioms do not need to be motiv-
ated: “When we hear spill the beans used to mean ‘divulge the informa-
tion’, for example, we can assume that spill denotes the relation of divul-
ging and beans the information that is divulged, even if we cannot say why
beans should have been used in this expression rather than succotash.”
From this passage it is obvious that Nunberg, Sag and Wasow regard
motivation as a predicting property. However, if we define motivation as
transparency of conceptual links between source and target, the idiom to
spill the beans must be characterised as being motivated. 6 Firstly, the mo-
tivating link is provided by the quasi-universal conceptual metaphors
standing behind this idiom: IDEAS ARE PHYSICAL ENTITIES and MIND IS A
CONTAINER . Secondly, the literal meaning of the verb to spill provides the
idea of an unintentional action the result of which is that entities lying in-
side a container are suddenly in plain view.
If the notions of motivation and semantic analyzability are defined
along the lines advocated in this paper the most convincing way to deal
with the relationships between these phenomena would be to consider ana-
lyzability to be a particular case of motivation. This results from the idea
that the existence of relevant conceptual links (motivation) is a necessary
prerequisite for comparing the structuring of both conceptual levels of the
content plane of idioms.
Much more important than to clarify the relations between analyzability
and motivation is to investigate how they interact in the idiom processing.
Compare Langlotz’s (2003) concept of “idiomatic activation set” including
both motivation and homomorphism (“isomorphism” in his terminology).
For instance, the conceptual structures relevant for the idiom to miss the
boat/bus ‘to fail to take advantage of an opportunity’ and operations on
them are represented as follows in (Langlotz 2003: 41):

1) MOVEMENT  ACTIVITY
JOURNEY  PURPOSEFUL ACTIVITY
2) VEHICLE  SUPPORTING MEANS FOR PROGRESS/
DEVELOPMENT
BUS/BOAT  SUPPORTING MEANS FOR PROGRESS/
DEVELOPMENT
3) MISS (THE BOAT/BUS)  NOT MAKE USE OF A MEANS FOR
PROGRESS/DEVELOPMENT = MISS A CHANCE
 Thus, knowledge structures relevant for understanding this idiom and
activated for its processing concern both its holistic semantic motivation
(cf., for example, the mapping from ‘movement’ to ‘activity’) and its se-
mantic analyzability (cf. the words bus and boat in their quasi-autonomous
reading ‘supporting means for progress/development’).
To sum up, semantic analyzability as well as motivation as a whole are
cognitively-based phenomena, which have no real predicting power. The
speakers have to know the overall figurative meaning to be able to (re)con-
struct the links between the conceptual structures involved in the content
plane of a given idiom (cf. Keysar and Bly 1999). The way in which they
do it varies from speaker to speaker. Also, the degree of semantic analyz-
ability is, to a large extent, an individual phenomenon, i.e. the same as mo -
tivation, it is based on interpretive strategies. The consequence is that here
we are dealing with tendencies rather than with rules.
Maybe the only case where we are dealing with semantic autonomy
stricto sensu are idioms containing words denoting some cultural symbols,
as they are interpreted in (Dobrovol’skij and Piirainen 1997, 2005) within
Conventional Figurative Language Theory. Such words are semantically
autonomous not only because of the structuring of relevant conceptual do-
mains, but also because of their semantics outside a given idiom. Compare
gold in an idiom such as to have a heart of gold ‘to be a friendly, generous,
forgiving person whose qualities are much appreciated’. The constituent
gold (i.e. the concept GOLD) can be singled out, and an autonomous mean-
ing – ‘something extremely good and valuable’ – can be attributed to it.
This idiom cannot be understood as a metaphor because it is not possible to
imagine that someone’s heart is really made of gold. What is meant is that
the speaker or hearer is able to activate a special component of his or her
cultural knowledge, namely the knowledge of certain non-literal functions
of the concept GOLD . The symbolic meaning ‘something very positive,
valuable’ is fixed in both language and culture. In this case we can speak of
semantic autonomy in the strict sense of the term. In most cases discussed
above we are instead dealing with an interpretive strategy mapping the
structure of the underlying metaphor onto the structure of the idiom’s lex-
icalized meaning.
Notions such as semantic analyzability belong to the metalevel of lin-
guistic description, i.e. this notion cannot be used to predict, for instance,
the discursive behaviour of every particular idiom or to “technically” de-
scribe its variation, but it does explain how the underlying cognitive mech-
anisms work. Though not predictable in detail, the behaviour of idioms in
discourse is not absolutely arbitrary. On the contrary, it reveals a certain
cognitively-based dependence on relevant conceptual and semantic proper-
ties, and above all, on the structure of the underlying metaphor.

Notes

1. This obvious restriction concerns not only the phenomenon of semantic ana-
lyzablility of idioms, but also their semantic motivation and variation, thus
such limitations must always be taken into account while investigating
idioms by cognitive methods. Compare in this regard (Langlotz 2003: 464):
“Since idiom transparency has been described as a cognitive phenomenon,
speakers must be expected to vary in terms of how they understand, store,
and process different idioms in their minds. A given idiom cannot be expec -
ted to be equally represented and motivated for all speakers. [...] Thus, since
idiom variation seems to be dependent on idiom representation, different
idioms cannot be unequivocally regarded as being equally variable for all
speakers. To explore this problem more extensively, more sophisticated psy-
cholinguistic experiments on idiom variation and representation are needed.”
Nunberg, Sag, and Wasow (1994: 525) also point out: “Individuals will nat -
urally differ regarding how readily they perceive the metaphorical basis of
an idiom, resulting in variability of judgments”.
2. Cf. examples from (Nunberg, Sag, and Wasow 1994: 502) which convinc-
ingly demonstrate the analyzability of the idioms to keep tabs (on somebody)
or to pull string (for somebody): Although the FBI kept tabs on Jane Fonda,
the CIA kept them on Vanessa Redgrave; Those strings, he wouldn’t pull for
you.
3. I would like to stress again that this restriction concerns only the conven-
tional use of the language. In certain situations, in which the standard usage
norms are violated in order to achieve specific communicative goals, the
passivization of the idiom to kick the bucket seems to be possible. Compare
the following situation described in (Gibbs and Colston 2007: 825): “Two
friends, Maria and Sven who have not spoken in a few weeks are having a
conversation. The last time they had spoken, Maria learned that Sven’s very
old pet dog was in poor health. During the present conversation, Maria asks
Sven about his dog and Sven replies, ‘The bucket was kicked’.”
4. This rule has certain exceptions. One of them is the so-called pied-piping,
i.e. a syntactic operation which moves a larger constituent if, semantically,
only a subpart of this constituent is affected. For example, contexts such as I
think my leg is being pulled are allowed because of this syntactic phe-
nomenon. It is necessary to move the constituent my leg into the subject pos-
 ition of the clause if the speaker wants to topicalize the possessor (in this
case, I standing behind my).
5. In the case of metaphorical motivation, two frames (source and target) are
involved. These concepts go back to the ideas of the Cognitive Theory of
Metaphor, developed by Lakoff and his colleagues (cf., for example, Lakoff
and Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1987, 1993); compare the metalinguistic appar-
atus of conceptual metaphor providing the mapping from source domains
onto target domains.
6. Compare (Langlotz 2003: 463): “idiom transparency results from a speaker’s
ability to (re)motivate the semantic structure of an idiom relative to well-es-
tablished cognitive models and entrenched patterns of semantic extension”.

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