Idiom processing: A psycho-pragmatic approach (Spanish text).

摘要

The present work offers a psycho-pragmatic approach to idiom processing that has enough flexibility to be able to account for any idiom, regardless of their nature. In order to achieve it, two different views of modeling idiom processing have been combined: the Idiom Decomposition Hypothesis , proposed by Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., and the pragmatic approach represented by Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory.; This work is structured in six chapters. Chapter 1 offers a terminological and typological analysis of the most common terms used to define idioms. This analysis highlights the vagueness with which the different terms are used. Thus, the definition and the typology proposed for idioms at the end of the chapter are only based on pragmatic criteria. Chapter 2 reviews the psycholinguistic models of idiom processing, carrying out a more specific analysis of Gibbs's model than of the rest. Chapter 3 analyzes the main ideas of Relevance Theory. Chapter 4 is divided into two parts. The first one deals with which idioms communicate explicitly and implicitly. The second part tackles the uses that speakers of a language make of idioms: descriptive use---when the concept communicated by the speaker is identical to the one encoded by the idiom---and interpretative and/or metalinguistic use---when the concept of the idiom the speaker communicates resembles semantically and/or formally the one encoded by the idiom. Chapter 5 focuses on the concepts underlying idioms, which reveals that idioms make immediately accessible sets of stereotypical assumptions whose number varies depending on their degree of lexicalization. Those sets of assumptions are the point of departure for the creation of an ad hoc concept in all cases, except when the lexicalized concept underlying the idiom coincides with the one encoded by the expression. Chapter 6 accounts for the representation of idioms in the mind, following the Sperberian distinction between intuitive and reflective concepts. This analysis leads me to the conclusion that idiom processing requires not only conceptual information but also procedural information that constrains the way in which that conceptual information is combined.