Idiom Comprehension: Two Approaches

Basing on the two most influential theories in the literature on idiom comprehension (Glucksberg 2001; Vega Moreno 2003, 2004, 2005) as well as on the account of familiar metaphor comprehension (Wilson – Carston 2006), the present author proposes an account of comprehension of familiar idioms as metaphorical expressions. Unfamiliar metaphors are comprehended on-line in a relevance-guided comprehension procedure which involves adjustment of concepts encoded in idiom constituents. When the metaphorical denotation of the idiom is memorised, the well-known idiomatic string is comprehended just as familiar metaphors in the sense of Wilson – Carston (2006), i.e. in the process of disambiguation of two encoded senses.