Understanding idioms and idiomatic expressions in context: a look at idioms found in an Irish soap opera

Abstract

This paper looks at idioms drawn from a corpus of soap opera and compares their communicative functions to those performed by idioms in corpora of naturally-occurring conversation. In this study soap opera data is validated as a suitable tool for demonstrating the role that idioms play in spoken interaction. Soap operas, as well as other media genres, try to convey a believable linguistic world, exploiting idioms and providing contexts in which the pragmatic functions of idioms can be understood and analysed. This paper suggests that the analysis of idioms found in soap opera can contribute to the increase of knowledge and understanding concerning the communicative functions that idioms have in conversation. The data used in this study is drawn from the corpora of naturally-occurring conversation --- the Limerick Corpus of Irish English (LCIE) and the Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English (CANCODE) --- and a corpus of the Irish soap opera, Fair City.