Idiomatic Expressions In British And American English: A Contrastive Analysis

INTRODUCTION 
 
 
Idioms are an important part of the colloquial language. Even if people are not aware of it, they 
are used very frequently in everyday speech and very often, when people have a conversation, they 
can be used without noticing them. For this reason idiomatic expressions have been object of 
several studies among linguists for the last decades. 
This work is going to give an analysis of the idiomatic expressions in British and American 
English, since these two countries, and more specifically their languages, are in a continuous 
relationship of comparison and contrast. 
The first chapter of this work will be concentrated on the linguistic study of idioms: first of all a 
definition of this particular form of speech (including the difference between ‘idiomatically 
combining expressions’ and ‘idiomatic phrases’) will be given, then the chapter will go on to 
develop their main properties (including conventionality, inflexibility, figuration and informality), 
and follow with the semantic analysis of idiomatically combining expressions and on the way 
speakers interpret their meanings. Two paragraphs will focus on the relationship between idioms 
and ‘dead’ metaphors and idioms and collocations. 
The second chapter will focus mainly on the analysis between Great Britain and the United 
States: the history and the development of the language (especially the development of the lexicon) 
in the two countries will be analyzed. Greater attention will be spent on discussing about the 
contrastive yet cooperative relationship between the two linguistic variants: even though Americans 
and British do not feel a particular affection for the other linguistic variant, American and British 
English often have a big influence towards each other, especially as far as the lexicon is concerned, 
as already mentioned above (mainly United States towards Britain).  
Since idioms are part of the colloquial language, a paragraph will be dedicated to the study of  
non Standard English, and more specifically slang. Slang is a form of colloquial language that has 
spread in Great Britain and America. As regards the first, attention will be placed on cockney and 
London slang, whereas as regards the United States, attention will be placed upon the birth of slang 
in a big city (such as New York City). A description of cant and argot (the two forms of language 
spoken by gangsters and criminals that are said to have originated slang) will be offered and then 
certain slang expressions that originated in New York City and that have spread across the whole 
country will be examined. 
The third chapter will focus on the analysis of idiomatic expressions in the two linguistic 
variants: more precisely, while the first chapter concentrates on a more generic and more linguistic 
analysis, this chapter will focus more on the semantic and cultural field. The first paragraphs will 
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discuss the main semantic sources many English idiomatic expressions have originated from, like 
humble occupations, popular sports, the army, houses and buildings, kitchen and cooking  and art 
and painting. Regarding the foreign influence, great importance will be given to idioms derived 
from the Bible (which are a vast number), from classical times and from other languages like 
French and Spanish. 
The last paragraph will be an analysis on the most important characteristics that many idioms 
have encountered in their diffusion in British and American: many of them originated in America 
(especially from the language of Indian Americans) and found a great diffusion also in Great 
Britain; others spread in both countries but with some slight differences (either in the grammar or in 
the lexicon) and others again that have the same form but a different usage in the two variants (even 
if there are not many of them). 
 
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IDIOMS AND IDIOMATICITY 
 
 
 
In the literature of generative grammar, idiomaticity has been widely identified with 
noncompositionality. Such a definition however does not recognize several important dimensions of 
idiomaticity, including, among others, conventionality and figuration (Fernando 1996:3). It is 
important to distinguish idiomatically combining expressions (e.g. take advantage, pull strings) 
whose meanings – while conventional – are distributed among their parts, from idiomatic phrases 
(e.g. kick the bucket, saw logs), which do not distribute their meanings to their components. 
A careful examination of the semantic properties of idioms and the metaphors that many of them 
employ is helpful to explain certain intriguing asymmetries and thematic roles of idiomatic noun 
phrases. 
In this chapter, various dimensions of idiomaticity and their relation to grammar theory will be 
analyzed and two paragraphs will be focused on the analysis of idioms and collocations and idioms 
and ‘dead’ metaphors. 
It must be said that idioms provide no evidence bearing one way or the other on such syntactic 
issues. As will be shown, the majority of phrasal idioms are in fact semantically compositional, and 
that the very phenomenon of idiomaticity is fundamentally semantic in nature. 
 
1.1 - DEFINING ‘IDIOM’ AND ITS PROPERTIES. A traditional definition of idiom can be 
more or less as the following: an idiom is a fixed expression whose meaning cannot be inferred 
from the meaning of its parts. Although at first sight straightforward, there is a curious element of 
circularity in this definition. It indicates that the meaning of an idiom cannot be inferred from (or, 
more precisely, cannot be accounted for as compositional function of) the meanings the part carry in 
that expression. 
The definition must be understood as stating that an idiom is an expression whose meaning 
cannot be accounted for as a compositional function of the meanings its parts have when they are 
not parts of idioms. The circularity is now plain: to apply the definition, the speaker must already be  
in a position to distinguish idiomatic from non-idiomatic expressions. 
Idioms occupy a very important region in a multidimensional lexical space, characterized by a 
number of distinct properties: semantic, syntactic, poetical, discursive, and rhetorical. 
The six main features of idioms are: 
• Conventionality: idioms are conventionalized, that means that their meaning or use can’t be 
predicted, or at least entirely predicted, on the basis of a knowledge of the independent 
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conventions that determine the use of their constituents when they appear in isolation from 
one another. The meaning of a collocation is not straightforward composition of the 
meaning of its parts. As an example, it can be used, once again, kick the bucket, whose 
meaning has nothing to do with kicking buckets (Lewis 1969) 
• Inflexibility: idioms typically appear only in a limited number of syntactic frames of 
constructions, unlike freely composed expressions (e.g. * the breeze was shot, * the breeze 
was hard to shoot, etc.) 
• Figuration: idioms typically involve metaphors (take the bull by the horns), metonymies 
(land a hand, count heads), hyperboles (not worth the paper it’s printed on), or other kinds 
of figuration. Of course speakers may not always perceive the precise motive for the figure 
involved – why shoot the breeze should be used to mean ‘chat’, for example, or kick the 
bucket to mean ‘die’ – but they generally perceive that some form of figuration is involved, 
at least to the extent of being able to assign to the idiom a ‘literal meaning’. 
• Proverbiality: idioms are typically used to describe – and implicitly, to explain – a recurrent 
situation of particular social interest (becoming restless, talking informally, divulging a 
secret, or whatever) in virtue of its resemblance or relation to a scenario involving homey, 
concrete things and relations – climbing walls, chewing fat, spilling  beans. 
• Informality: like other proverbial expressions, idioms are typically associated with relatively 
informal or colloquial registers and with popular speech and oral culture. 
• Affect: idioms are typically used to imply a certain evaluation or affective stance towards 
the things they denote. A language doesn’t ordinarily use idioms to describe situations that 
are regarded in a neutral manner – buying tickets, reading a book – though of course one 
could imagine a community in which such activities were sufficiently charged with social 
meaning to be worthy of idiomatic reference. 
Apart from the property of conventionality, it can be explained that none of these properties 
applies necessarily to all idioms. There are some idioms, for example, which do not involve 
figuration, and, at the same time, not all idioms have literal meanings that denote concrete things 
and relations, many idioms lack register restrictions and some even have a decidedly literary flavour 
(e.g. render unto Caesar). 
Yet when a fixed expression, that is missing one of the relevant properties described above, 
occurs, people become reluctant to call it an idiom. 
This has been quite a big problem: since idioms are not a linguistically natural kind, many 
linguists have tended to overgrammaticize the phenomena, and people have to appeal not just to the 
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semantic properties of idioms, but to the figurational processes that underlie them and the discursive 
functions they usually serve. 
 
1.2 - IDIOMS AND COLLOCATIONS. The term collocation will be used to refer to sequences 
of lexical items which habitually co-occur, but which are nonetheless fully transparent in the sense 
that each lexical constituent is also a semantic constituent. Such expressions as fine weather, 
torrential rain, high winds are examples of collocations. 
These are of course easy to distinguish from idioms; nonetheless, they do have a kind of 
semantic cohesion – the constituents elements are, to varying degrees, mutually selective. The 
semantic integrity or cohesion of a collocation is the more marked if the meaning carried by one (or 
more) of its constituent elements is highly restricted contextually, and different from its meaning in 
more neutral contexts. Consider the case of heavy in heavy drinker. This sense of heavy requires 
fairly narrowly defined contextual conditions: one may speak of a heavy smoker, or a heavy drug-
user, a car may be heavy on petrol, etc. For this sense of heavy to be selected, the notion of 
“consumption” as the immediate environment seems to be a prerequisite. 
Semantic cohesiveness is even tighter if the meaning of one of the elements of a collocation 
requires a particular lexical item in its immediate co-text (cases where all the elements are uniquely 
selective in this way seem not to occur). Such is the case, for example, foot the bill and curry 
favour. 
With expressions such as these, another transitional area bordering on idiom is obviously 
approached. It can be analyzed, for instance, the expression foot the bill, that can be considered 
semantically transparent. It is also un-idiom-like in the fact that bill is fairly freely modifiable (I’m 
expected to foot the bill, the electricity bill, al the bloody bills!). 
Yet it has some distinctly idiom-like characteristics, too. One of these is that foot (in the relevant 
sense) demands the presence of a specific lexical partner; pronominal anaphoric reference to a 
previously occurring bill apparently will not do (e.g. I’ve just got the bill for the car repairs. – I 
hope you don’t expect me to foot it!). 
Collocations like foot the bill, whose constituents do not like to be separated, may be termed 
bound collocations. Although they display some of the characteristic properties of idioms, bound 
collocations are nevertheless lexically complex. 
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