Why prosodies aren’t always present: Insights into the idiom principle

Phraseological units, ranging from fixed collocations to idioms, are often defined as non-compositional strings, which reflects their formal characteristics but not their semantic traits. Semantic analysability – the ability to derive the meaning of the whole from the individual meanings of the components – is also a characteristic of phraseological units, but one that tends to be reserved for idioms. Drawing from extensive work into the relationship between metaphor, idiom and phraseology (Philip forthcoming), this contribution will demonstrate how semantic prosody interacts with semantic analysability. Semantic analysability operates along a continuum, and it will be seen that the more phraseological meaning is distanced from the meanings of its component parts, the more pronounced and important the semantic prosody becomes. Comprehensive discussion on the terminology used is included, as are detailed examples of the lexical items examined.