Food and Drink Idioms in English: “A Little Bit More Sugar and Lots of Spice”
Idioms carry an aura of mystery for all speakers, owing to the discrepancy between their literal and non-literal meanings. This book clears up some of these ambiguities, by examining a series of expressions that have derived from the most instinctive and essential of all human behaviour: eating and drinking. The quantity and quality of 276 food and drink idioms are explored, investigating two hundred and fifty years of English monolingual lexicography and forty years of usage as attested by contemporary linguistic corpora. The examination of these idioms’ syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, historical, social and cultural characteristics will foster in speakers a whole new approach to idiom comprehension and usage, and will constitute thought-provoking ground for further research in other idiom domains.
Laura Pinnavaia is Full Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Milan, Italy. Her research interests in lexicology and lexicography have resulted in the publication of over forty articles, one edited volume, Insights into English and Germanic Lexicology and Lexicography: Past and Present Perspectives (2010), and three books, The Italian Borrowings in the OED: A Lexicographic, Linguistic and Cultural Analysis (2001), Sugar and Spice… Exploring Food and Drink Idioms in English (2010), and Introduzione alla Linguistica Inglese (2015). She is currently working on English seventeenth-century travelogues of Italy and on the compilation of an Italian-English dictionary of collocations.
"Food and Drink Idioms in English ‘A Little Bit More Sugar and Lots of Spice” is an intensely in-depth exploration into the linguistic history of idioms that we often take for granted and use without a thought, and a fascinating examination of the evolution of language through exposures to different cultures and diets that demonstrate in the most basic of terms ‘we are what we eat’. [...] Pinnavaia’s research comes to a satisfying conclusion where exploration has revealed that idioms follow clear patterns in form and function, and endorses the notion that “idioms are not merely appendages of language, but central and effective instruments of communications” put forward by phraseology research of the last few decades."
Tan Kim Hua, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia The Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies 24/2 (2018)
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