Laura Pinnavaia. 2010. Sugar and Spice… Exploring Food and Drink Idioms in English

To say it right from the start: this book is a most welcome contribution to English (historical) phraseology. Its aim is to study the lexicographical treatment and actual usage, with regard to both quantity and quality, of 276 idioms 1 containing nouns from the semantic field of food and drink. To this aim, the study combines two major approaches to descriptive idiom studies, namely lexicography and corpus linguistics, with an eye on the needs of the present-day learner of English as a foreign language. The historical dimension of the investigation of twelve monolingual dictionaries extends over 250 years, from Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language ( 1755 ) to the sixth edition of the Collins Cobuild Advanced Dictionary (2008) . Spanning a much smaller time period, the corpora studied are the 100 million words of the British National Corpus (1975–1994, with 10% spoken data, including some imaginative texts going back to 1964) and a small version of the Bank of English comprising 56 million words and covering texts from 1991 onwards (with c.27% spoken data). 2 At the end, Pinnavaia manages to bring to light important, partly astonishing findings

American English · Corpus linguistics · Lexicography · Linguistics · Natural language processing · Noun · Phraseology · Computer Science · History · Lexicography and Language Studies · Mathematics · Philosophy · Artificial Intelligence