A Study of the Literature on the Problems to Practice a Frequency Count of English Idioms

Abstract

The importance of "idioms" is often pointed out in teaching or learning English as a foreign language. But in reality there exists nearly no reliable "idiom list" which is selected based on a frequency count of English idioms. Although the need is obvious, not much advance has been made in this field. In order to find out the causes, a literature research has been carried out. From this research, it has been shown that one of the causes lies in the definition problem of English "idioms". In spite of many theoretical approaches, no unified definition has ever been made. Each definition has its own idiom category and differs in the precise idiom coverage. A clear-cut distinction between "free combination", "collocation" and "idiom" is also said to be difficult to be made. Within A Course of Study by the Ministry of Education in Japan, there is no reference to "idioms", only "collocations". According to the description, "collocations" to be taught must be selected on the criterion that they are "basic". Because no list of "collocations" is concretely given, however, selection must inevitably be relied upon by the teacher's subjective judgement When it comes to the frequency count of English idioms, other problems raise their heads in turn. First of all, a large corpus must be prepared because each idiom is not remarkably high in its frequency of occurrence. Secondly, unlike "words", idioms to be counted must be selected prior to their retrieval. Thirdly, the algorithm of the retrieval must be considered because idiom components can sometimes change their forms and also their positions. If appropriate solutions can be found for the problems clarified above, an effective "idiom list" can be expected to be made in the near future.