A corpus-based analysis of idioms in American English. Some case studies from the semantic field of food.

Abstract

This work focuses on providing a corpus-based analysis of a set of American idioms on food. The first part of the work gives the theoretical and methodological background that was used to carry out the subsequent corpus-based analysis. It also provides a description of idioms from a semantic, syntactic, pragmatic and cultural point of view, as well as an account of the linguistic history and features of American English. In the second part of the work, the corpus-based approach is put into practice by analyzing the frequency and usage of some American idioms on food selected according to well-defined criteria. Through the use of the Corpus of Contemporary American English, each idiom is analyzed by taking into account the frequency over a specific period of time (1990-2012), and the distribution across five genres: conversation, fiction, magazine writing, newspaper writing and academic prose. By comparing the data collected from the Corpus of Historical American English and the Oxford English Dictionary, an attempt is also made to understand when each idiom first entered American English.