A topic to rack our clever brains on: Premodification in Hungarian and English body-part idioms

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine the adjectival premodification tendencies in English and Hungarian V + NP idioms that involve body-part terms. Investigating the modified variations of twenty expressions in corpora, five major types of premodifiers have been found to occur with this particular class of verbal idioms: conjunction, expressive, external, intermediate, and internal. Conjunction adnominals modify only the literal referent of the body-part term; ex-pressives provide some additional emotional content, while external modifiers have the whole VP in their scope, and function as adverbials. The intermediate type operates only at the figurative level, modifying the abstract meaning of the head noun. Within internal modification, two subclasses should be distinguished: (i) the Stathian (2007) literal-only, and (ii) the literal-and-figurative proposed by Cserép (2010). Intermediate level as well as literal-and-figurative modifiers require the noun to be semantically autonomous, therefore, in principle, these two types can occur only with transparent idioms. It turned out, however, that this is not always true.