Phraseme in the context of "Lexicon"

A cliché (UK: /ˈkliːʃeɪ/ or US: /kliːˈʃeɪ/; French: [kliʃe]) is a saying, idea, or element of an artistic work that has become overused to the point of losing its original meaning, novelty, or figurative or artistic power, even to the point of now being bland or uninteresting. In phraseology, the term has taken on a more technical meaning, referring to an expression imposed by conventionalized linguistic usage.

The term, which is typically pejorative, is often used in modern culture for an action or idea that is expected or predictable, based on a prior event. Clichés may or may not be true. Some are stereotypes, but some are simply truisms and facts. Clichés often are employed for comedic effect, typically in fiction.

In grammar, a phrase—called an expression in some contexts—is a group of one or more words acting as a grammatical unit. For instance, the English expression "the very happy squirrel" is a noun phrase which contains the adjective phrase "very happy". Phrases can consist of a single word or a complete sentence. In theoretical linguistics, phrases are often analyzed as units of syntactic structure such as a constituent. There is a difference between the common use of the term phrase and its technical use in linguistics. In common usage, a phrase is usually a group of words with some special idiomatic meaning or other significance, such as "all rights reserved", "economical with the truth", or "kick the bucket". It may be a euphemism, a saying or proverb, a fixed expression, a figure of speech, etc. In linguistics, these are known as phrasemes.

In theories of syntax, a phrase is any group of words, or sometimes a single word, which plays a particular role within the syntactic structure of a sentence. It does not have to have any special meaning or significance, or even exist anywhere outside of the sentence being analyzed, but it must function there as a complete grammatical unit. For example, in the sentence Yesterday I saw an orange bird with a white neck, the words an orange bird with a white neck form a noun phrase, or a determiner phrase in some theories, which functions as the object of the sentence.

In corpus linguistics, a collocation is a series of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, a collocation is a type of compositional phraseme, meaning that it can be understood from the words that make it up. This contrasts with an idiom, where the meaning of the whole cannot be inferred from its parts, and may be completely unrelated.

There are about seven main types of collocations: adjective + noun, noun + noun (such as collective nouns), noun + verb, verb + noun, adverb + adjective, verbs + prepositional phrase (phrasal verbs), and verb + adverb.

A saying is any concise expression that is especially memorable because of its meaning or style. A saying often shows a wisdom or cultural standard, having different meanings than just the words themselves. Sayings are categorized as follows:

• Aphorism: a general, observational truth; "a pithy expression of wisdom or truth".
  • Proverb, adage or saw: a widely known or popular aphorism that has gained credibility by long use or tradition.
  • Apothegm/Apophthegm: "an edgy, more cynical aphorism; such as, 'Men are generally more careful of the breed of their horses and dogs than of their children.'"
• Axiom: a proposition that commends itself to general acceptance; a well-established or universally conceded principle; a maxim, rule, or law.
• Cliché or bromide: an unoriginal and overused saying.
  • Platitude: a cliché that is unsuccessfully presented as though it were meaningful, original, or effective.
• Epigram: a clever and often poetic written saying that comments on a specific person, idea, or thing; it especially denominates such a saying that is conspicuously put at the beginning of a text.
• Epitaph: a saying in honor of a decedent, often engraved on a headstone or plaque.
• Epithet: a descriptive word or saying already widely associated with a specific person, idea, or thing.
• Idiom or phraseme: a saying that has only a non-literal interpretation; "an expression whose meaning can't be derived simply by hearing it, such as 'kick the bucket.'"
  • Four-character idiom:
    • Chengyu: Chinese four-character idioms
    • Sajaseong-eo: Korean form of four-character idioms
    • Yojijukugo: Japanese form of four-character idioms
• Mantra: a religious, mystical, or other spiritual saying that is repeated, for example, in meditation.
• Maxim: (1) an instructional expression of a general principle or rule of morality or (2) simply a synonym for "aphorism"; they include:
  • Brocard
  • Gnome
  • Legal maxim
• Motto: a saying used frequently by a person or group to summarize its general mission.
  • Credo: a motto implicitly or explicitly extended to express a larger belief system.
  • Slogan: a motto with the goal of persuading.
• Quip: a clever or humorous saying based on an observation.
• Witticism: a saying that is clever and usually humorous and that is notable for its form or style just as much as, or more than, its meaning.

In linguistics, phraseology is the study of set or fixed expressions, such as idioms, phrasal verbs, and other types of multi-word lexical units (often collectively referred to as phrasemes), in which the component parts of the expression take on a meaning more specific than, or otherwise not predictable from, the sum of their meanings when used independently. For example, ‘Dutch auction’ is composed of the words Dutch ‘of or pertaining to the Netherlands’ and auction ‘a public sale in which goods are sold to the highest bidder’, but its meaning is not ‘a sale in the Netherlands where goods are sold to the highest bidder’; instead, the phrase has a conventionalized meaning referring to any auction where, instead of rising, the prices fall.

Chinese characters, also known as Han characters, Chinese script or Hanzi, are logographs used to write the Chinese languages and other Far Eastern languages from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture such as Japanese, Korean and (pre-colonial) Vietnamese. Unlike letters in the alphabets of most languages, which only transcribe the phonetics (phonemes) of speech (i.e. are phonegraphs), Chinese characters generally represent morphemes, the basic units of meaning in a language, thus making them the linguistic equivalent of words rather than letters, while the majority of "words" in the Chinese lexicon are in fact compounds and phrasemes (short phrases). The pronunciation of Chinese characters is transcribed phonetically via separate (usually romanized) transliteration systems such as the Pinyin, Zhuyin, Jyutping, Wade–Giles or Yale system.

At the most basic level, Chinese characters are composed of strokes (the actual linguistic equivalent of letters), which are written in a fixed stroke order for each character. The strokes are then organized into radicals, which are the fundamental root components that represent either a semantic feature or a homophone (often based on the Middle Chinese pronunciations) of the character. Historically, methods of writing characters have included carving inscriptions on stone, animal bones (usually turtle shells) or bronze; drawing ink onto bamboo slips, fabric (typically silk) or paper; and printing with woodblocks or moveable type. Technologies invented since the 19th century to facilitate the use of characters include telegraph codes and typewriters, as well as input methods and text encodings on computers.