An Analysis of English Idioms Found in One Album of Aerosmiths.

Abstract

English idioms often appear in different part of speech and variety structures. Understanding the types and structural variations of English idiom can help readers recognize how English idioms exist in an oral or written communication. Therefore, this research entitled An Analysis of English Idioms Found in One Album of Aerosmith’s was done in order to find the types and structural variations of English idioms in Aerosmith’s song lyrics.

The source of the data of this research was Aerosmith’s song lyrics in the album20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection: The Best of Aerosmith. It includes twelve song lyrics which are written in English. This research was a qualitative research. The data of this research were collected in several steps. The writer chose Aerosmith’s album, downloaded and printed out the lyrics, observed English idioms in lyrics, found out the meaning of idioms, highlighted those idioms, and wrote those idioms in other papers. The writer also applied several steps in analyzing the data. He observed that those English idioms were valid, classified those English idioms into types, identified the meanings, observed some English idioms which get structural variations, and analyzed the structural variations.

The writer applied the theory of Cowie (1985) to classify the types of idioms. Cowie classifies the types of idioms into three subheadings. Then, the writer applied the theory of Baker (1992) to analyze idiom structural variations. Baker shows that there are five structural variations of idioms. The writerconcluded thatthere are three main classifications of the types of idioms found in Aerosmith’s song lyrics; phrasal idiom, verbal idiom, and sentential idiom. Then, there are five kinds of variations of idioms found in Aerosmith’s song lyrics; by changing the order of the words, deleting a word, adding a word, replacing a word with another, and changing its grammatical structure.