Out of the blue: Specifying the Semantic Nature of the Idiom

Abstract

The paper analyses semantic nature of the idiom ‘out of the blue’ within an approach, developed in the last few years, which ignores idioms as semantically non-compositional word groups whose meaning cannot be deduced from the meaning of its constituents. The proposed approach is based on identifying the source domain scenario of the idiom as a verbal model of human experience, which allows to reveal the figurative and evaluative potential of the idiom. The issue of the differences between idiomatic word combinations and compound words often treated as idioms in dictionaries is also being outlined and the criteria for their differentiation are discussed. Refs 11.