DIACHRONIC CONSIDERATIONS

This study is synchronic, but institutionalization is a diachronic process and historical aspects cannot be ignored. It is important to remember that much of the lexical, syntactic, and semantic anomalousness of FEIs results from

historical processes. Cranberry collocations such as to and fro or kith and kin contain lexical items that formerly had wider currency. The ill-formed

collocation through thick and thin is an ellipsis of through thicket and thin

wood, and of course is an ellipsis of a matter of course or of the postnominal

groups of course and custom and of common course (see OED). Other

ill-formed collocations may be considered dialectally well formed: for free may be unacceptable in written standard English but conforms to a standard frame

for five pounds, for nothing. Cutler ( 1982) correlates the age of FEIs and their

transformational deficiencies, pointing out that some items originally had unstable or flexible forms, but they have frozen over time: Chapter 6 will look at variation and the unfreezing and destabilization of FEIs.

FEIs disappear, and others emerge. The stock of cranberry collocations increases when the real-world referents of component lexical items cease to exist or are superseded: for example, not matter a brass farthing, bent as a

nine-bob note, or don't spoil the ship for a ha'porth of tar, to give three

numismatics examples. Phraseological collocations are productive and formed by analogy, like most other kinds of neologism. Metaphors, initially

transparent, come in from sporting, technical, and other specialist domains: for example, baseball metaphors such as (way) out in left field, (not) get to

first base, or touch base, computing metaphors such as garbage in garbage out, and business metaphors such as there's no such thing as a free lunch. As

neologisms become institutionalized and divorced from their original contexts of use, the explanation or motivation for the metaphor may become lost or obscure. They accordingly undergo processes of semantic depletion or semantic shift.

Some metaphorical FEIs and proverbs may be traced back to classical or Biblical sayings or historical events--better late than never, all roads lead to

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crying in the wilderness, and burn one's bridges/boats--and Crystal lists FEIs

first recorded in the Bible or in Shakespeare ( 1988: 198f.). The common European linguistic and cultural heritage has had a strong influence on English FEIs in the past; less so today, since the strongest influence appears now to be intervarietal, with American FEIs penetrating British English. Historically, however, many FEIs were formed through calquing. The peculiar valency of beg the question is the result of its being a calque, an imperfect and infelicitous translation of the Latin logic term petitio principii (itself recorded in OED from 1531 and glossed as 'begging or taking for granted of the beginning or of a principle' and a calque of a Greek term to en arkhei atteisthai, 'the asking in the beginning'). This can be compared with the situation in bilingual

Anglophone communities, where the other language influences the

development of calques in a non-standard variety of English. For example, Odlin ( 1991) reports cases of Irish idioms being transferred into an

indigenized form of English, as in you couldn't make stiff on him ('you couldn't make free with him'), which corresponds to Ni fhéadfá bheith teann air, literally 'Not could-you be stiff on-him'. Section 6.1.12 looks briefly at calques which exist in (more or less) standard English alongside their originals. All this ignores non-naturalized FEIs such as al dente, mano a mano, and Vorsprung

durch Technik which are found in at least some registers or varieties of

English. They constitute a restricted part of the lexicon, and I will not be

discussing them.More significant cross-linguistically or sociolinguistically is the way in which English FEIs are influencing other languages, entering those

languages as calques. Significantly, Pedersen ( 1986: 129f.), Newmark ( 1991: 80), and Danchev ( 1993: 58ff.) see calquing as part of the dynamic

development of languages, whereby foreign idioms and the like are

incorporated into the lexicon, although the violations of perceived norms may cause problems. Pedersen cites as an example Danish de er velkommen 'you're welcome' to acknowledge thanks (compare Canadian French

bienvenue). In another paper ( 1992), he lists recent borrowings from English

into Danish, which he sees in the context of 'language approximation' within the European Union, whereby widely spoken languages such as English

influence less widely spoken languages such as Danish. Amongst the calques are:

feje problemet under (gulv)tæppet 'sweep the problem under the carpet' få fingeren ud 'get one's finger out'

for mange høvdinger og for få indianere 'too many chiefs and too few

Indians'

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Moberg ( 1996) reports on the same phenomenon in Swedish, where calques include the ball is in someone's court, back to square one, and get cold feet. Both Pedersen and Moberg list respectively Danish and Swedish calques of be

caught with one's pants/trousers down, keep a low profile, and not be one's cup of tea. Moberg points out the oddness of the last within the context of a

Swedish culture: similarly Pedersen points out the oddness of references to chiefs and Indians in a Danish culture. Danchev ( 1993) cites recent Bulgarian

adoptions of translations of let the cat out of the bag, (with) a long face, and

rock the boat. Danchev comments on the sociocultural significance of this:

since 1989, the status of English has risen in Bulgaria and attitudes towards language change have relaxed, and the calques function as indicators of 'sociolinguistic prestige and group cohesion for people with a knowledge of English'.In his preface to Danchev's paper, Lefevere sets borrowing of phrasemes or FEIs in a wider perspective, arguing that kinship between the FEIs of different languages is not a matter of etymology but of 'interactions on the personal, group, and national level' ( 1993: 57). This can be related to arguments that FEIs are realizations of intertextuality: see, for example, Hatim and Mason ( 1990: 132 and passim).An obvious way in which English FEIs realize intertextuality is where catchphrases drawn from cinema, television, politics, journalism, and so on become institutionalized as sayings and other kinds of formula. This process can be observed in the following, of various vintages:

And now for something completely different Didn't she do well

Go ahead, make my day I think we should be told I'll be back

I'll have what she's having Pass the sick bag, Alice That will do nicely

There is no alternative [abbreviated as TINA]

This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship the white heat of this revolution [usually, 'the white heat of the technological revolution']

We wuz robbed

A few recent institutionalized proverbs are attributable: -42-

It takes two to tango (song by Hoffman and Manning)

When the going gets tough, the tough get going (popularized by Joseph Kennedy)

The opera isn't over until the fat lady sings ( Dan Cook)

It is not certain exactly how catchphrases establish themselves as ritualistic FEIs, but in the clearest cases above, they are associated with a memorable event or film sequence, or consistent media use. They are repeated as

boundary markers, commentary devices, greetings, and so on, and become situationally or culturally bound.In other cases, FEIs become established as pithy ways of expressing and referring to concepts. Hyphenation is an indicator of the processes of institutionalization and lexicalization ( Pawley 1986: 108). The catenation of strings into quasi-single words signals the writer's intention to consider a string as a unit, or his/her insecurity about the holism, in the same way that scare quotes signal a writer's insecurity about register or terminology. Some such strings found in OHPC are transformations of FEIs, typically as modifiers:

on a first-come-first-served basis an emotive, pulling-no-punches oration his charity-begins-at-home appeal

But others are neologistic:

It was a perfect 'I-never-thought-I'd-live-to-see-the-day situation'. Six months ago it [sc. a hotel] changed owners, but remained in the hellohow-may-I-help-you realm.

The chaos might amuse the man who belonged to the live-fast- dieyoung-have-a-good-looking-corpse school.

Not Ava, though, with her nothing-is-but-theories-make-it-so line. Although these expressions are not fossilized, they represent the formulation and bonding of concepts. Some formulations are ephemeral and ad hoc; others allude to or reflect established cultural stereotypes. Underlying all this are processes of creativity and stability ( Cowie 1988): Cowie observes patterns of semantic depletion in interaction-oriented FEIs and of semantic shift in more transactional ones ( 1988: 132f.). Taking this further, stability can be seen in repetitions, patterns, and collocations in general; creativity in variation and exploitation. The processes are interwoven in complex ways, and must be explored in the context of language as discourse.

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