Author Information
Rena Alasgarova, Charles University, Czech RepublicJeyhun Rzayev, ADA University, Azerbaijan
Abstract
Idioms present a well-known challenge in language description, translation, and language learning because their interpretation often depends on culturally specific knowledge. A particularly important subset are culture-bound idioms, whose meanings rely on references to historically and culturally salient entities such as places, persons, institutions, or events. Despite extensive research on idioms and phraseology, relatively little work has systematically examined how such culturally anchored expressions can be classified and empirically investigated using large corpora. This study proposes a preliminary typology of cultural anchors and domains for English culture-bound idioms and examines their distribution in contemporary language use. In the first stage of the project, approximately one hundred idioms were collected from major idiom dictionaries and encoded in a structured lexicographic dataset. Each idiom was classified according to its cultural anchor (e.g., toponym, anthroponym, institution, historical event, or mythological figure) and its associated cultural domain. In a second stage, currently in progress, representative idioms from each domain were checked for attestation in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the British National Corpus (BNC). Preliminary results indicate that culture-bound idioms cluster in several dominant domains, particularly historical, social, and political contexts. The proposed typology provides a foundation for future corpus-based analyses of idiom usage and for applications in translation studies and language pedagogy.
Paper Information
Conference: WCE2026Stream: Language Development & Literacy
This paper is part of the WCE2026 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Alasgarova R., & Rzayev J. (2026) A Corpus-Based Typology of English Culture-Bound Idioms ISSN: 2760-7259 The Washington DC Conference on Education 2026: Official Conference Proceedings (pp. 31-42) https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2760-7259.2026.3
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2760-7259.2026.3
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