JOURNAL LINGUISTICS

Marja Nenonen

Prototypical Idioms: Evidence from Finnish

In general idiom is a term that eludes an explicit definition. There are four features and all in different conceptual levels. First, idioms are multi word syntagms and this is a linguistic convention in order to rule out. Second, idioms are non compositional. Third, idioms are regarded as morpho syntactically and lexically restricted. And the last one is idioms are always conventional in a sense that they are institutionalized. According to the criteria, we can define a prototypical idiom a multi word, non compositional, fixed lexical unit whose meaning is institutionalized. It must be known that Not every idiom can be called prototypical, although it fulfills the conditions mentioned above, because a prototype usually refers to a basic level category.

As regards lexicon, Finnish language is fairly transparent at least phonologically if not always semantically and it is relatively easy to separate the stems from the endings. Traditionally, in addition to single words, also the derivative and inflectional endings are located in the lexicon, which serves our purposes in describing the current Finnish lexical system. In the following sections, our aim is to look deeper into the lexical and morphological structure of Finnish idioms.

The data that has been collected is talk about Finnish verbal idioms. The data are:

a.        The literary corpus, a sample of written Finnish fiction.

b.       The Karjalainen Corpus. Karjalainen corpus is one of the newspapers in Finnish.

c.        The Finnish Language Bank.

d.      Moreover, several Finnish dictionaries have been instrumental, especially in collecting body part noun idioms and studying the different meanings of basic verbs.

The most typical Finnish idiom is a verb phrase idiom that usually consists of a finite verb (or an infinitive) and one or more complements. Another typical group, noun phrase idioms, does not necessarily include a specific verb. Typically, a noun phrase idiom complements a verb phrase, which is usually realized as a predicative and may appear with various verbs.

Idiom-prone words are productive in a sense that they appear in several idioms, highly frequent in large text corpora, and, moreover, they are poly semous. These words include the basic verbs and body-part nouns that will be discussed in detail below.

According to the corpora and Finnish dictionaries, some nouns prove to be idiom-prone as well. Especially the most common body part nouns which refer to the most prototypical body parts tend to appear in idioms, for example: pää ‘head,’ silmä ‘eye,’ and käsi ‘hand’ are the most common body part names in idioms

In this paper, the Finnish data indicate that idioms participate in lexicalization, not through the regular lexeme forming processes, derivation and compounding, but through idiom constructions with particular case and/or number inflections. the implication arrows illustrate the dynamics of idiom formation in the Finnish lexicon. And that derivations and compounds mainly derive from basic words and that compounds may include derivations as well, the focus is on idioms. Derivations are extremely rare in phrasal idioms, and so are also compounds. phrasal idioms are complex enough without derivations or compounds. it participates in lexeme formation through inflection in addition to the traditional methods of morphological word formation, derivation and compounding. Prototypical idioms are also close to single lexical units in the sense that their component words lose much of their semantics. The basic verbs are close to grammatical or functional words, and so are also many of the complements, although the range of complement nouns is wider.

Comment

            Actually this paper gives a positive thing to our knowledge about Finnish language because in this paper we get important information about a prototypical Finnish idiom. More than that The Finnish data also indicates that idioms, albeit syntactic phrases, also play an important role in lexicalization. Beside that this paper also explains to us that idiom has four features and all in different conceptual levels. The first one, idiom are multi word syntagm, the second one idioms are not compositional. Third, idioms are regarded as morpho syntactically and lexically restricted. And the last one idioms are always conventional in a sense that they are institutionalized. Based on the explanation before we have several information and understand about the function of idiom in language especially in Finnish language.