Linguistic Idioms: the Creative Enunciative Practices Originated from Rhizomatic Ruptures

In this paper, the formation processes of linguistic idioms were studied using social semiology framework, specifically, the semiotic approach of Theo Van Leeuween: “discourse as the recontextualisation of social practice”. This paper aimed to introduce linguistic idioms as the structures that make the speeches expansive and powerful. The main problem here was to deal with how the linguistic idioms, which were creative structures, were formed from real, common, and specified situations. To solve this problem, we considered 3 questions: 1) According to Van Leeuween approach, what kind of connection was there between social reality and linguistic idioms? 2) According to semiotic approach, which kind of discourses did the linguistic idioms originate from? 3) According to Deleauze’s approach, how did the interaction between verbal texts and linguistic idioms result in meaning formation? The hypotheses of this study were as follows: 1) It seemed that linguistic idioms were discourses, which were recontextualized through social realities; 2) The linguistic idioms were action-oriented discourses; 3) The meaning formation was done due to devaluation and valuation (value transfer), cognition change, and creation of semantic depth and volume. To evaluate these hypotheses, we studied 10 cases of the most widely used Persian linguistic idioms. The results showed that the first and second hypotheses were confirmed partially and the third one was corroborated completely. One of the main achievements of this research was introducing the linguistic idioms as enunciative practices, which originated from discourses related to social practices and that they had rhizomatic function, network function, and puzzle function.