Stirred but not shaken
How fixed are fixed
expressions?
Olli O. Silvennoinen
Collocations cross-linguistically
CoCoLaC, University of Helsinki, 8 May 2015
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Background
• PhD project on contrastive negation in English
(2015-2018, Doctoral programme for language
studies/general linguistics)
• If you’re interested: Silvennoinen 2013
1. Shaken, not stirred.
2. Make love, not war!
3. Last but not least…
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Fixed expressions
Shaken, not stirred
Make love, not war!
Last but not least
• Processed and retrieved as wholes
• Most are actually variable, i.e. open to compositional
analysis, but to varying degrees
• Conscious variation or sub-conscious approximation?
(Heinonen 2013; Mauranen 2012; Moon 1998; Sinclair 1991; Wray 2002)
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Fixed or variable?
Every Cosmo girl has an
inherent bed right: to be
shaken and stirred
between the sheets.
An embarrassing public
defeat has left Prechter
defensive but unbowed,
shaken but not stirred.
(COCA)
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Antonyms as collocates
• Canonical antonyms co-occur with one another in texts
(e.g., Justeson & Katz 1991: 4)
Soil redeposition is evaluated by washing clean swatches
with the dirty ones.
Originals are not necessarily good and adaptations are not
necessarily bad.
• These co-occurrences are often in a limited number of
syntactic frames (e.g., Mettinger 1994, Jones 2002)
from X to Y
either X or Y
X and Y alike
X not Y
turning X into Y not X but Y
• These frames may buttress the acquisition of canonical
antonyms as pairs and the antonym relation in general
(Jones et al. 2012)
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Hypothesis
If pairs such as shaken/stirred, love/war and last/least appear in
the same contrastive constructions as antonyms, they should
also form collocations that are independent of the original
constructions. (Murphy 2006.)
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Data and methods
• Searching for the pairs shaken/stirred, love/war and
last/least in the Corpus of Contemporary American
English (COCA) and the Corpus of Historical
American English (COHA)
• Search window: ±9 words
• COCA: 450 million words, 1990-2012
• COHA: 400 million words, 1810-2009
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Results:
shaken/stirred
• 60 hits in COCA – in 3, the link probably not based
on shaken, not stirred
• Cf:
shaken: 3,359 hits
stirred: 3,662 hits
Add the shallots. Place in a container that can be
easily shaken or stirred […]
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Syntactic variability:
shaken/stirred
Example
Frequency (n=57)
No wonder it sits well on a wrist not far from a shaken,
not stirred, martini. [MAG]
X not Y: 29
…the dessert and cocktail cultures are getting shaken
and stirred together, with delicious results. [NEWS]
X and Y: 11
Kim was shaken, but not stirred, by the prospect of
keeping vigil in a desolate lighthouse [SPOK]
X but not Y: 6
Some people want them shaken, and some want them
stirred. What do you recommend? [MAG]
…the theory that a Martini ought to be stirred and not
shaken [MAG]
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Others: 11
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Semantic variability:
shaken/stirred
Manhattans to start (based on
Old Overholt rye, stirred 100
times, never shaken).
35
30
25
An embarrassing public defeat
has left Prechter defensive but
unbowed, shaken but not
stirred.
a James Bond theme party
called "Shaken Not Stirred II "
20
15
10
5
0
Even Bond's mandatory catchphrases such as Shaken, not
stirred are A.W.O.L.
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the dessert and cocktail
cultures are getting shaken
and stirred together, with
delicious
results.
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Historical development:
shaken/stirred
• The first James Bond novel in 1952, film in 1962
• But: COHA shows co-occurrences even in the 19th
century
The powder should be dried for a few minutes in the sun
before it is put into the flask, and it should be well shaken
and stirred to break any lumps that may be in it. [1855]
• This kind of example becomes very rare after shaken, not
stirred takes over in the 1960s (but it does persist even in
COCA: 5% of co-occurrences)
• Caveat: all figures very small.
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Discussion:
shaken/stirred
• Independent from the parent expression
• ...but the parent expression is the most common
context for co-occurrence
• Meaning shift based on pre-existing meanings of the
words (mental state, change of state)
• Changes to the collocational profiles of shaken and
stirred: have coordinations in the physical senses
become rarer (if not related to cocktails)?
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Results:
love/war
• 539 hits in COCA
• Cf.
love: 152,358 hits
war: 178,115 hits
• Of these, only 39 are definitely linked to make love,
not war!
• Accidental co-occurrences
• Other phrases: All’s fair in love and war
• Other collocations: love and hate, war and peace
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Syntactic variability:
love/war
Example
Frequency (n=39)
"'Make love not war' was more important than 'Workers of
the world, unite!'"
He's not making love. He's making war.
[…] I'd check the barracks a last time and find the guys sitting
in darkness and watching feelies the laser projectors
humming, the virtual actors making love and war in four
dimensions […].
I've learned it's a lot more fun to make love than to make
war
X not Y: 27
Other negatives: 3
Conjunctions with
and: 4
Comparatives: 3
Indeed, the traditional manuals of moral theology offered
priests and penitents extensive and detailed directives about
nearly every other sort of ethical concern: when we could or
could not take someone else's property, […] make war, love,
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Semantic variability:
love/war
As the play moves toward the
present, one character proclaims,
"'Make love not war' was more
important than 'Workers of the world,
unite!'"
30
25
20
15
But first, let's look at that report on
how important it is to a marriage to
make not just love, but war.
10
5
0
Metalinguistic
Referential or
semi-referential
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Historical development:
love/war
• Protests against the Vietnam war in the 1960s
• In COHA, the first instances in 1966 (n=25)
• One anachronistic instance from 1914 (!)
But you seem to forget that we are not making love
but war.
0,6
Frequency 0,4
per million
words 0,2
0
1950s
1960s
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1970s
1980s
1990s
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Discussion:
love/war
• Based on a pre-existing semi-canonical opposition,
already a collocation
• Many metalinguistic uses, a proxy for the 1960s
counter-culture
• Frequency past its peak
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Results:
last/least
• 2,311 hits in COCA
• A sample of 500 was created and studied
• In the sample, there were 92 hits that were related
to last but not least
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Syntactic variability:
last/least
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
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And, last but certainly not
least, there are no WMDs in
Iraq.
If you feel as though you are
the last person you know who
is still single, remind yourself
that "last does not mean
least."
Last and least are the
temporary squatter
kampungs.
It seems the last if not least
that we can do.
Last, but not the least
important, is how far the
new futures contracts
succeed
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Conclusion
• Shaken, not stirred
Rare collocation based on the original expression;
may have altered the co-occurrence pattern of the words
• Make love, not war!
Original expression based on pre-existing collocation;
use on the wane, much of it metalinguistic
• Last but not least
Original expression quite common;
modifications frequent but modest, little meaning shift
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References 1/2
• COCA = Davies, Mark 2012. The Corpus of Contemporary
American English (COCA): 450 million words, 1990-present.
Brigham Young University.
• COHA = Davies, Mark 2010. The Corpus of Historical
American English (COHA): 400 million words, 1810-2009.
Brigham Young University.
• Heinonen, Tarja Riitta 2013. Idiomien leksikaalinen kuvaus
kielenkäytön ja vaihtelun näkökulmasta. Doctoral
dissertation, University of Helsinki.
• Jones, Steven 2002. Antonymy: A Corpus-based
Perspective. London: Routledge.
• Jones, Steven, M. Lynne Murphy, Carita Paradis & Caroline
Willners 2012. Antonyms in English: Construals,
Constructions and Canonicity. CUP.
• Justeson, John S. & Slava M. Katz 1991. Co-occurrences of
antonymous adjectives and their contexts. Computational
Linguistics
17(1):
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References 2/2
• Mauranen, Anna 2012. Exploring ELF: Academic English
Shaped by Non-native Speakers. CUP.
• Mettinger, Arthur 1994. Aspects of Semantic Opposition in
English. Oxford: Clarendon.
• Moon, Rosamund 1998. Fixed Expressions and Idioms in
English: A Corpus-based Approach. OUP.
• Murphy, M. Lynne 2006. Antonyms as lexical constructions:
or, why paradigmatic construction is not an oxymoron.
Special volume of Constructions 8.
• Silvennoinen, Olli O. 2013. Shaken, not stirred: A
Construction Grammar account of contrastive negation in
English. MA thesis, University of Helsinki.
• Sinclair, John M. 1991. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation.
OUP.
• Wray, Alison 2001. Formulaic Language and the Lexicon.
CUP.
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Thank you!
E-mail: olli.silvennoinen at helsinki.fi
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