Clichés, an Understudied Subclass of Phrasemes

Abstract

Abstract Natural languages have three major families of phrasemes: - Lexical phrasemes (phraseologized phrases): kick the bucket, black box, pay a visit, if you know what I mean. - Morphological phrasemes (phraseologized wordforms, see [Beck & Mel’čuk 2011]): for+get, light+house, in+dispens+able. - Constructional, or syntactic, phrasemes (phraseologized constructions, or phrase schemata): “X(N) VINF?!?”, as in John be afraid?!? For more details on phrasemes within the Meaning-Text framework, see (Mel’čuk 2015: 336-340). This paper proposes an overview of an important subclass of lexical phrasemes that has not been as yet paid sufficient attention: cliches. First, a typology of lexical phrasemes is presented, with the definitions that underlie the subsequent discussion; this provides a formal framework for the description of cliches (Section 1). Second, the class of cliches is examined and a typology of cliches is proposed, based on the type of the cliche’s referent (Section 2). Third, a dimension for restrictions on the use of lexemic expressions in particular situations of linguistic communication is introduced-namely, a pragmatic constraint. Applied to cliches, it defines a subclass of a subclass of cliches- pragmatemes (Section 3).