Linguistic Idioms: the Creative Enunciative Practices Originated from Rhizomatic Ruptures

Abstract

AbstractIn this paper, the formation processes of linguistic idioms were studied using social semiology framework, specifically, the semiotic approach of Theo Van Leeuween: “discourse as the recontextualisation of social practice”. This paper aimed to introduce linguistic idioms as the structures that make the speeches expansive and powerful. The main problem here was to deal with how the linguistic idioms, which were creative structures, were formed from real, common, and specified situations. To solve this problem, we considered 3 questions: 1) According to Van Leeuween approach, what kind of connection was there between social reality and linguistic idioms? 2) According to semiotic approach, which kind of discourses did the linguistic idioms originate from? 3) According to Deleauze’s approach, how did the interaction between verbal texts and linguistic idioms result in meaning formation? The hypotheses of this study were as follows: 1) It seemed that linguistic idioms were discourses, which were recontextualized through social realities; 2) The linguistic idioms were action-oriented discourses; 3) The meaning formation was done due to devaluation and valuation (value transfer), cognition change, and creation of semantic depth and volume. To evaluate these hypotheses, we studied 10 cases of the most widely used Persian linguistic idioms. The results showed that the first and second hypotheses were confirmed partially and the third one was corroborated completely. One of the main achievements of this research was introducing the linguistic idioms as enunciative practices, which originated from discourses related to social practices and that they had rhizomatic function, network function, and puzzle function.Keywords: social semiotics, Theo Van Leeuween, discourse, enunciative practice, linguistic idioms, Gilles Deleuze IntroductionLinguistic idioms are a group of linguistic structures, which do not have literal and compositional meanings. Their proper use shows language proficiency and language speakers’ high levels of linguistic knowledge. These specified linguistic structures are formed as a result of an interactional and creative process; that means the creative social subjects or language speakers cause a linguistic sign, which is used only in a specific language context and has a limited usage that is spread and becomes metaphorical. Thus, this process is a transition from “being” to “becoming”. Materials and MethodsTo investigate the hypotheses and answer the research questions, 10 commonly used Persian linguistic idioms were examined based on 3 approaches: discourse semiotics, social semiotics of Theo Van Leuween, and Gilles Deleuze’s approach. Discussion of Results and ConclusionAnalysis of the studied idioms in this paper showed that language speakers make discourses related to social practices. These discourses are action discourses, cognitive discourses, sensory- perceptual discourses, or a combination of them. Creative speakers make changes on those common and familiar discourses; thus, enunciative practices are created. Due to the interaction between creative language speakers and going through the processes of discourse resistance, discourse insistence and discourse appeasement, they are converted into linguistic idioms. Therefore, idioms are not discourses but enunciative practices; in addition, they are originated not only from action discourses, but also from cognitive discourses, sensory-perceptual discourses, or a combination of them. When these idioms are placed between texts, they have 3 functions: rhizomatic function, puzzle function, and network function.

Keywords

• social semiotics
• theo van leeuween
• discourse
• enunciative practice
• linguistic idioms
• gilles deleuze