Predictors of correct interpretation of English and Bulgarian idioms by Russian speakers

Table 2 sums up some major typological cross-linguistic relations between Bulgarian, English and Russian idiomatic expressions. The marker vs (`versus') separates idioms which are contrasted to each other. For example, in the second column the first two proverbs (Russian and Bulgarian) are separated from the English one by this marker, which means that the Russian and Bulgarian proverbs are contrasted with the English one. Naturally, the first column in the table does not have the marker `vs', since all the idioms are identical from the point of view of their meaning and structure. The fourth column does not have this marker either, as the idioms are considered as nearly identical equivalents on account of a close underlying image and the identical meaning in all the three languages.

Table 2

Typological classification of Bulgarian, Russian and English idioms

Hypothesis, methods, materials and data collection

Research hypothesis

Bulgarian is so closely related to Russian that seeing Bulgarian words on a printed page, one is bound to immediately notice a lot of crossover between letters, morphemes, syntactic structures and set expressions. Unlike Bulgarian, English is much further removed from Russian etymologically, although all the three languages belong to the Indo-European family. Given this, the working hypothesis of the present research is that nearly-proficient Russian students of English are exposed to centripetal and centrifugal linguistic forces that may cause them to produce a (slightly) bigger number of either Bulgarian or English idioms, with the postulated statistical variation lying within the medium range.

Participants

The participants that took part in the research are 50 Russian speakers of English of comparable age, socio-economic status and educational level: third-year- students from Moscow Pedagogical State University, aged 20-22, with advanced level of English. All the students completed the course in English lexicology, of which English phraseology forms a substantial part, totaling around 40 academic hours. All the participants also completed a course of general linguistics during their 1st academic year, in which, among other aspects of general linguistics, they studied the genealogical classification of languages. This module accounts for around 35 academic hours and comprises rather detailed information about the Slavonic, Germanic, Romance and other groups of Indo-European languages. Special attention was paid to the Slavonic and Germanic languages because most of the students are Russian and their major is English. Given this, the participants are familiar with the general typology and genealogy of Bulgarian, although none of them knows Bulgarian to any degree of proficiency.

Materials

The material for the research consists of two parts: the total sample includes 5000 idioms - 2500 from English and 2500 from Bulgarian. The equal numbers of idioms were chosen for reasons of quantitative objectivity and validity. The final subsample, which was used in the experimental part of the research, comprises 60 idioms (30 Bulgarian and 30 English ones) selected from `The Oxford Dictionary of Idioms' (2004) and `Nov fraseologichenrechniknabylgarskiyajezik(`Новфразеологиченречникнабългарскияезик'1999) compiled by means of stratified systematic sampling: selecting every tenth example on a page with a new alphabet letter. This method ensures the reliability and impartiality of the final sample. The number of idioms was determined by the assumption that 30 is the minimum required number for a t-test to be considered statistically relevant and representative. Choosing more idioms would have put undue stress on students who were given only 90 minutes to complete the task. Since the assignment (`Supply the meaning of each English and Bulgarian idiom without consulting a dictionary') is open-ended, it required a considerable amount of time. Asking the students to interpret more idioms would have compromised the accuracy of the experiment.

Procedure and data analysis

All the students were presented with two lists of 30 idioms and given 90 minutes to complete the two tasks. Each idiomatic expression was thus given slightly more than a minute, which is enough time to produce the target item if the learner is aware if its existence or can guess its meaning from its constituent parts. In addition to the explanation of the task, an example of its possible completion was provided. An unstructured, post-hoc interview was conducted with the participants to find out what difficulties they had experienced when completing the task. Table 3 is a faithful reproduction of the task presented to the participants. As can be seen from Table 3, the task was given in English, since all the participants are advanced or proficient speakers of English.

Table 3

The experimental task given to the participants

In the table below, there are 30 idioms from English and 30 idioms from Bulgarian, which are unrelated in their meaning or structure. Please, supply the meaning of each English and Bulgarian idiom without consulting a dictionary. Make a guess if you are unsure of an idiom's meaning. Answers can be given either in English or in Russian. You are given 90 minutes to accomplish the task. Example: to have green fingers: to enjoy working in the garden. хвърлям прах на някого: пускать пыль в глаза, tothrowdustinsmb.'seyes

The interpretation of results was conducted with the help of the paired t-test. This statistical tool is appropriate for the purposes of the present study, because participants, who are native-speakers of Russian, interpreted idioms from two other languages, which allowed to adjust for the varying level of students' knowledge of English in general and awareness of idioms in particular. The advantage of the paired t-test is that it also makes it possible to calculate the result both including and excluding the outliers. The results proved to be significant in both cases.

Results

The paired t-test statistical tool revealed a slight imbalance in favour of the Bulgarian idioms, which is statistically significant at p-value equaling 0.0157952. The observed standardized effect size is medium (0.35) and there are 15 outliers, i.e. participants who came up with an equal or a slightly higher number of English idioms. Table 4 indicates the number of correctly interpreted English and Bulgarian idioms by each of the 50 participants. Table 5 sums up the results of the paired t- test analysis. Fig. 1 is a graphic illustration of the T-Distribution.

Table 4

The number of correctly interpreted English and Bulgarian idioms by each of the 50 participants

Table 5

Results of the paired t-test analysis as applied to the interpretation of Bulgarian and English Idioms

Fig. 1. T-Distribution

Discussion

Most of the difficulties in interpretation were caused by idioms containing cultural allusions, such as the proper name NeddKelly. Correct interpretation of this idiom and the idiom in Abraham's bosom requires a higher degree of thesaurus activation - background knowledge of the relevant realia, including knowledge of the Bible and the history of English. Although the idiom plain Jane also contains a proper name, its interpretation did not cause much difficulty due to the presence of the first `give-away' adjective used in its direct, rather than transferred meaning: `not attractive or pretty enough'. Other idioms that caused interpretative difficulty were damp squib, in jig time and all hands. The first one contains an unusual element as it is rarely used outside this idiom. The expression in jig time contains a noun used as an adjective and is probably falsely associated with the dance type `jig', which, coupled with the word `time', results in an opaque expression. Although this attributive use of a noun is quite typical of English, a comparable use is not found in Russian, hence the difficulty which may have been caused by negative interference - extrapolation of internalized syntactic patterns of one's mother-tongue into a foreign language. Finally, the meaning of the idiom all hands is too specific - it refers to the members of a ship's crew due to which this technical meaning in rarely known as refers to a nautical term.

As predicted, the correct interpretation was given to Bulgarian idioms which contain words and structures shared with the Russian language. This pertains to the idioms гръмотяснонебеlit. `thunder from the clear sky', имамзъбнанякогоlit. `to have a tooth on smb.', невиждапо-далечеотносасиlit. `not to see farther than one's nose', which are structurally and semantically isomorphic to Russian idioms. The most interpretative difficulty was caused by those Bulgarian idioms that contain opaque words (typically, borrowings) or the so-called false friends: cf. накраставичаркраставиципродавамlit. `to sell cucumbers to a cucumber- seller', стъпвамнавратананякогоlit. `to put one's foot on smb.'s neck'.

Idioms seem to be stored in the long-term memory not only thematically or in topically related clusters, but also according to their source of origin and structure. Given this, cross-cultural code-switching is facilitated when speakers aim to produce idioms which are structurally isomorphic, have common origin or are part of the shared cultural heritage, such as the Latin language, the Bible or calques. This pertains to the English idiom to sell like hot cakes adopted through loan- translation into Bulgarian and Russian, and to the proverb All roads lead to Rome adopted by a number of European languages, including Russian (ср. ВседорогиведутвРимlit. `All roads lead to Rome') and Bulgarian (ср. ВсичкипътищаводяткъмРимlit. `All roads lead to Rome').

Conclusion

The results of the research proved the working hypothesis and revealed that it is the degree of etymological proximity and affinity between languages that is a better predictor of correct interpretation of two sets of idioms by native speakers of the language closely related to one of the languages involved in the experiment. Although the Russian participants are all fluent speakers of English, their largely implicit cultural cognition makes them potentially more cross-culturally competent when decontextualized set expressions from Bulgarian, rather than English, are given for interpretation. This can partly be explained by a comparable linguistic and axiological prioritization, i.e. a set of values encoded by Russian-Bulgarian idiomatic counterparts rather than Russian-English idioms. This also means that cultural allusions embedded in Russian-Bulgarian idioms are interpreted more efficiently than those encoded by English idioms which in many cases are opaque.

The experiment also partly proves that common cultural conceptualisations of Russians and Bulgarians seem to arise without the participants' prior linguistic or cultural contact, since none of them know Bulgarian or have ever been to Bulgaria. On the other hand, linguistic competence is not in itself a sure predictor of correct interpretation of stable multi-word units. This seems to suggest that a lack of intercultural competence is a factor to reckon with. Putting it differently, a comparable set of intercultural values reflected in language significantly facilitates interpretation of stable multi-word items. Whether the same holds true for single words or, possibly, sentences is a matter of further investigation.

The implications of the research are manifold. The background knowledge of linguistic and cultural information connected with set expressions is likely to facilitate code-switching and to raise communicants' awareness of the extensive international stock of idioms. From the typological and genealogical point of view, the main paradigmatic relations that exist between Bulgarian, Russian and English idioms should be taken into account during cross-cultural communication: interlocutors should be alerted to a rather numerous group of false friends in order to avoid communicative breakdowns and to speed up and facilitate the process of cross-cultural communication.

One of the fascinating areas and desiderata for further research is the systemic investigation of the relations between Russian, Bulgarian and English paremiological units, i.e. proverbs and sayings. Preliminary findings suggest that approximately 15% of cases idioms and proverbs which descended from one and the same source, such as the Bible or fables, have acquired slightly different connotations in Russian, Bulgarian and English. This definitely proves that language does not remain static or develops in isolation: the people, the nation and the culture, i.e. the proprietors and the bearers of a language, are prone, either willingly or unwittingly, to slightly modify the meanings of linguistic items to suit their communicative needs.

Some of the avenues for further research comprise the following aspects: (1) theoretical and empirical research into the quantifiable correlation between the degree of genealogical proximity of languages and the number of correct interpretations of idioms, (2) study of conditions that stimulate loan-translation and the semantic fields which are more likely to be loan-translated, (3) cross-linguistic typological comparison of the symbolic meaning of numbers in Russian, Bulgarian and English idioms. While preliminary findings have shown that number 3 plays an important symbolic role both in Russian and Bulgarian due to the Orthodox Christianity, in Russian other numbers, such as 7, 40, 100 and 1 000 seem to play a more prominent role, which could probably be explained by a more pronounced proclivity for exaggeration, a cultural feature of Russian speakers that has been much commented on by Wierzbicka (Wierzbicka 2014).

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