General Characteristics and Origins of English Idioms with a Proper Name Constituent
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS AND ORIGINS OF ENGLISH IDIOMS WITH A PROPER NAME CONSTITUENT A Study Based on their Etymology as Available in the Typical Compilation University of Tampere Department of English Pro Gradu Thesis Autumn 2005-09-27 Heikki Reijonen ABSTRACT The data consists of the one hundred English idioms with a proper name constituent, occurring most frequently in the ten final sources containing the most PN idioms among the twenty original works, whose 500 idioms are also used for numerical comparisons. The aim of this thesis is to chart the terrain of modern English proper name idioms, i.e. to find their general features: where they derive from, in what forms and structures they normally appear, how they are located in British and American geography, and what type of sphere of activity and attitudinal tone they represent. This study also seeks to find out what information is given in the data on each person or locality that has lent its name to the idiom. To this end, three aspects for each idiom were checked in the idiom compilations (the sources), and the Oxford English Dictionary (the reference work): definition, etymology, and the first quotations of actual use. By information value, the sources studied fell into three categories: 1) those seldom extending beyond the definition (OxfId, ChambId, LongId), 2) those adding to the definition some sort of derivation (R&S, CollId, Noble), and 3) those defining, deriving, and usually also ’backlighting’ the idiom from various perspectives (Brewer, M&M, Hunt, and Funk). In summary, the typical source is likely to enhance the general reader’s conception of some of individual idioms, but is equally likely, on the whole, to leave the inquisitive (etymologically-minded) student rather dissatisfied: the mean grade scored by the ten sources was 2.04 out of the maximum of 3.
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