Food and Drink Idioms in English

Download or read book Food and Drink Idioms in English written by Laura Pinnavaia and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-01-10 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Idioms carry an aura of mystery for all speakers, owing to the discrepancy between their literal and non-literal meanings. This book clears up some of these ambiguities, by examining a series of expressions that have derived from the most instinctive and essential of all human behaviour: eating and drinking. The quantity and quality of 276 food and drink idioms are explored, investigating two hundred and fifty years of English monolingual lexicography and forty years of usage as attested by contemporary linguistic corpora. The examination of these idioms’ syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, historical, social and cultural characteristics will foster in speakers a whole new approach to idiom comprehension and usage, and will constitute thought-provoking ground for further research in other idiom domains.