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Led Down The Garden Path: Cognitive Processing Of English Language Idioms, Daniel Alan Vandehey

Dissertations and Theses

The discourse community surrounding the study of idioms often disagree regarding the proper classification of idioms. Some scholars believe that the figurative meaning of many idioms cannot be determined through the deconstruction of their lexical parts, and therefore should be classified as an irreducible lexical unit. Others believe that even though the figurative meaning of some idioms are obscured, people process these opaque idioms as they would a metaphor, constructing meaning through an integration process that includes the component pieces of the idiom, the surrounding context, and the message receiver's knowledge network. This study forwards research concerning whether idioms should …