現代英語の新しい成句と構文

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概要

• 論文の詳細を見る

• A living language changes as time changes. In the history of linguistics, we have quite a few linguists who attribute the cause of the linguistic change to the "principle of economy' or the "principle of least effort" Among those advocates are included Dwight Whitney, Henry Sweet, Otto Jespersen, and Andre Martinet. Those linguists find a tendency in the human nature to use least energy or effort to achieve the same thing whenever it is possible. I addressed myself to the theoretical aspect of this "principle of least effort" somewhere else, and this paper aims to give some examples to illustrate this principle working in present-day English. Idiomatization or forming set-phrases is one of the interesting aspects of linguistic change where the "principle of economy" has worked. Numerous examples of idioms or set-phrases have been formed in English because simply memorizing them and using them in appropriate contexts fulfill the speaker's objectives without creating hitherto unknown grammatical combinations. Idioms like "make love" or "kick the bucket," for example, spare us plenty of time and energy to euphemistically express what we mean without embarrassment. Set-phrases are constantly being created in English, and dictionaries of the language usually do not catch up with this trend, or sometimes lexicographers are not aware of new creations of set phrases because they are so natural and everyday occurrences for native speakers of English (although such set phrases often give difficulties to non-native speakers). This paper discusses the following three sets: comes at a cost, back when, and can't think wh-clause as are illustrated below: (1) Cheap travel insurance comes at a cost. (2) I like Debbie. Well, I'm a fan anyway, you know, from way back when. (3) 1 can't think why the submarine hit the boat.

著者

• 八木 克正

  関西学院大学社会学部

関連論文

• 現代英語の新しい成句と構文
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