Literal and nonliteral meaning in placename idioms

Abstract

: This paper discusses idioms of the form be/come from X-place , where X-place is a placename which contains an adjectival or verbal root. Using a corpus of examples from the Internet, the constructional properties of placename idioms and aspects of their distribution are considered. The examples are taken from German, Dutch and English. After a general introduction of placename idioms, we focus on the subtype represented by German aus Dummsdorf kommen ('be from Stupid-village ᾽ ). The following aspects of the expression will be discussed: the set of verbs involved, their syntactic flexibility, their interpretation, their status as individual-level (rather than stage-level) predicates, and the fact that they appear in nonveridical contexts, primarily negative sentences, questions, and modal/subjunctive contexts, making them a special type of negative polarity item.