Das semantische Potential der Idiome aus kognitiver Perspektive

Abstract Idioms are especially complicated language units from a semantic point of view. They are motivated, expressive, ambigue, imagic and imaginistic, and contain a semantic added value. This corpus-based research on idioms shows that their meanings are not as stable as it has been presumed until now and that dictionary definitions contain many shortcomings. The aim of this article is to reveal the semantic potential of idioms in use and to explain it from a cognitive perspective. It is argued that the semantic complexity of idioms results from two aspects: (i) their ambiguity based on interaction between the literal and the lexicalized meaning, (ii) their polylexicality – the semantic derivations can occur not only on the level of the word group but also concern the individual components. As this research shows, the most important mechanisms of meaning constitution are metonymy, metaphor and metaphtonymy.