The New York Times の中に見る類推困難イディオム

抄録

The purpose of this paper is to find out how many figurative English idioms can be found in The New York Times articles and to have a close look at how they are acting in those articles. Idioms in this paper mean English expressions that nonnative speakers of English cannot easily understand through words used in the expression. With the help of computer search function I got numbers of idioms used in The New York Times. The results are as follows:
1. 180 different figurative idioms are found in 700, 000 English words in the newspaper.
2. Idioms with a part of the body, like “bat an eye, ” take 17 percent of all figurative idioms.
3. Idioms with one of natural existents hold 10 percent, idioms with a tool name 12 percent and figurative idioms with miscellaneous things 61 percent.
Cliche expressions, like “bring home the bacon, ” are also found in today's newspaper. The number is 30. I presume that writers of The New York Times intend to give us vividness and freshness by using figurative idioms because those expressions are conspicuous in the newspaper sentences.