Sugar and Spice... Exploring Food and Drink Idioms in English (English Library: The Linguistics Bookshelf, Vol. 5)

To this day, metaphoric idioms carry an aura of mystery that contemporaneously fascinates and scares the English language user, both native and not. While it is common for English native speakers to acknowledge the existence of a particular communicative tension that idioms' staggered literal and figurative readings create, it is not uncommon for them to be unaware of what tension is at play and why. This mystery thus often leads native speakers to consider metaphoric idiomatic expressions as no more than mere linguistic appendages, and non-native speakers as obstacles to language learning. The aim of this book is to clear up some of the mystery that lies behind such idioms. This is carried out by exploring one important category of metaphoric idioms: food and drink idioms. The book is focused on the figurative expressions that have derived from probably the most instinctive and essential behaviour of human beings, that of eating and drinking. The quantity and quality of the idiomatic expressions that this human action has created is explored across two hundred and fifty years of English monolingual lexicography, supported by forty years or so of real English usage (as attested by contemporary linguistic corpora). The book unveils some recurring features in the syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, historical, social and cultural make-up of English food and drink idioms. Such characteristics will help native speakers and non-native alike to approach idioms more confidently. From a linguistic point of view, this book offers intriguing issues for theoretical debate, and opens up the possibility for new paths of research in other idiom domains.