Idiomatic expressions and anaphoric reference in functional discourse grammar

Abstract

This paper deals with a special type of anaphoric relation that consists in a reference through/to a part of a fixed idiomatic experience. It is proved that, contrary to what is generally assumed, such references are not necessarily grammatically or stylistically marked. Instead, they are part of several productive usage patterns. With corpus data and a discursive-functional grammatical approach, I provide a theoretically-substantiated analysis of each of these patterns. This analysis shows their production and interpretation processes, accounts for their systematicity and productivity, and puts forth an explanatory proposal of the cognitive effort and communicative advantages of their use.