Using cross-modal priming, we investigated the processing of idioms in non-native listeners in varying experimental contexts. As idiomatic processing models have presented evidence for an idiomatic mode of processing that can be activated for non-native speakers in highly figurative contexts (Bobrow & Bell, 1973), this experiment revisits those claims while also examining access to figurative m...

Idiom processing and reference resolution are two complex aspects of text processing that are commonly treated in isolation. However, closer study of the reference needs of some idioms suggests that these two phenomena will need to be treated together to support high-endNLP applications. Using evidence from Russian and English, this article describes a number of classes of idioms according to t...

Theories and computational models of natural language understanding that handle idioms generally circumvent the question of novel modifications to idioms. Yet such variations are prevalent in the media. This paper addresses the perhaps most challenging type of idiom variation, i.e., variation of decomposable idioms through nontrivial metaphoric modifications in the source domain, i.e., the doma...

This study investigates how L2 learners judge the familiarity and transparency of English idioms and whether these judgments would be associated with comprehension. It compares the performance of 90 undergraduate (Level 1 and Level 4) EFL students on tasks measuring idiom familiarity, transparency and comprehension. Results showed that the Level 4 students rated the idioms higher in familiarity...

The theory of metaphor proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980a, 1980b) and Lakoff (1993) involves a mapping of conceptual structure from one semantic domain to another. We investigate properties of these conceptual domain mappings by comparing them to morphological derivational relations. Schematicity and productivity are properties that Bybee (1985) and Langacker (1987) propose for characterizin...

Eugene A. Nida’s theory of functional equivalence has been highly valued and has influenced the practice of translation in general. It can be applied as a guiding criterion in Chinese idiom translation. This paper attempts to apply the functional equivalence theory to the English translation of Chinese idioms so as to overcome the difficulties encountered by translation practitioners. After th...

Idiom translation is a challenging problem in machine translation because the meaning of idioms is non-compositional, and a literal translation is likely to be wrong. In this paper, we assess the quality of idiom translation of a modern neural MT system. We introduce a new evaluation method based on an idiom-specific blacklist of literal translations, based on the insight that the occurrence of...

In this paper I present an approach to idioms in the HPSG framework. Building on earlier work by Copestake 1994, it employs phrasal types that specify the semantic relationship between the idiomatic words involved. Underspecified Phrasal Semantics (UPS) does not require separate lexical entries for the words occurring in idioms, and treats a wide range of data more successfully than previous al...