Idioms in Context David Lodge’s Changing Places as a Case Study

When learning a foreign language, everyone has confronted a situation where h/she is unable to understand meanings of all the words in a sentence. This represents an obstruction to the process of interpretation of a sentence. Such an inability to identify correct meaning of a particular sentence often results from an occurrence of idiomatic expression (s) or phrase (s) within the sentence. The foreign language student wants to know which idioms should be used in a given situation. He also wants to avoid the pitfalls of vulgar, inappropriate and incongruous idioms. In short, he wants both information and guidance. Therefore, some of the idioms he learns will be used in conversation, others for recognition purposes when learning a foreign language. One can understand all the expressions in a sentence, though he cannot comprehend its overall meaning. This paper attempts to: 1. Shed light on using idioms in context and indicators that signal which meaning is probably intended by speaker (s): literal or idiomatic. 2. Focus on idioms and their ambiguity by means that reduce this ambiguity to some extent. 3. Explain types of idioms and their classifications which distribute idioms into groups according to their shared qualities. The following hypotheses are posed in this study: 1. Successful learning of idioms depends upon processing context clues, the transparency or figurativeness. 2.Idioms are easier to understand in context than in isolation. 3. idiomatic expressions represent a typical feature of informal speech. For the analysis, David Lodge’s novel “Changing Places” (1975) has been chosen as a case study. This novel contains plenty of expressions e. g. idiomatic expressions and their ambiguous expressions that will be appropriate for the analysis. Moreover, as there are several types of idioms and not all of them, of course, can be arranged into one category. This novel is a representative of the literary genre. Short (1996); Brown Yule (1983) are the theoretical models used as the basis for the analytical work. Since we are dealing with a literary text, these models will provide us with useful hints when interpreting sentences from the novel by Lodge. Those sentences which have idioms may represent a problematic aspect in the interpretation of the novel.