Natalia I Vargas-Cuentas
email: natalia.i.vargascuentas@ieee.org

Avid Roman-Gonzalez
email: roman-gonzalez@ieee.org

Alicia Alva Mantari

Luis Anthonyaucapuma Muñoz

EPIDEMIOLOGY STUDY OF THE CHAGAS DISEASE IN BOLIVIA USING REMOTE SENSING DATA

Remote sensing is the technology that has enabled us to obtain information about the Earth's surface without directly contacting it. For this reason, currently, the Bolivian state has considered a list of interesting applications of remote sensing in the country, including the following: biodiversity and environment monitoring, mining and geology, epidemiology, agriculture, water resources and land use planning. The use of satellite images has become a great tool for epidemiology because with this technological advance we can determine the environment in which transmission occurs, the distribution of the disease and its evolution over time. In that context, one of the important diseases related to public health in Bolivia is Chagas disease, also known as South American Trypanosomiasis.

Chagas is caused by a blood-sucking bug or Vinchuca, which causes serious intestinal and heart long term problems and affects 33.4% of the Bolivian population. This disease affects mostly humble people, so the Bolivian state invests millions of dollars to acquire medicine and distribute it for free.

Due to the above reasons, the present research aims to analyze some areas of Bolivia using satellite images for developing an epidemiology study. The primary objective is to understand the environment in which the transmission of the disease happens, and the climatic conditions under which occurs, observe the behavior of the blood-sucking bug, identify in which months occur higher outbreaks, in which months the bug leaves its eggs, and under which weather conditions this happens. All this information would be contrasted with information extracted from the satellite images and data from the Ministry of Health, and the Institute of Meteorology in Bolivia. All this data will allow us to have a more integrated understanding of this disease and promote new possibilities to prevent and control it.

I. INTRODUCTION

Vectors are living organisms that can transmit diseases, from one infected person or animal to another [START_REF] Rojas-Cortez | Trypanosoma cruziinfected Panstrongylus geniculatus and Rhodnius robustus adults invade households in the Tropics of Cochabamba region of Bolivia[END_REF].

The vectors cause serious diseases in the human being and are more prevalent in tropical and subtropical areas and in places with problems of access to drinking water and sanitation.

For the World Health Organization (WHO) over 17% of infectious diseases are transmitted by vectors [START_REF] Das | Chagas disease in the State of Amazonas: history, epidemiological evolution, risks of endemicity and future perspectives[END_REF]. Chagas disease (CH) is a serious public health problem because of its impact and complicated control [START_REF] Coura | Risks of endemicity, morbidity and perspectives regarding the control of Chagas disease in the Amazon Region[END_REF].

In the Latin American region, Chagas disease is present in 20 countries, as we can observe in the next figure and currently affects 8 to 9 million people and more than 90 million people are at direct risk of contagion [START_REF] Messenger | Toward Improving Early Diagnosis of Congenital Chagas Disease in an Endemic Setting[END_REF]. CH is caused by the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi (TC) [START_REF] Das | Chagas disease in the State of Amazonas: history, epidemiological evolution, risks of endemicity and future perspectives[END_REF]. The vinchucas nest and multiply in houses built with precarious materials, such as adobe, mud or straw, for this reason in rural areas where this type of constructions predominate, people are at higher risk of contracting the disease [START_REF] Coura | Risks of endemicity, morbidity and perspectives regarding the control of Chagas disease in the Amazon Region[END_REF].

The main CH infection is carried out by contact of mucous or wounded skin with the feces of the infected host animal, usually a triatomine insect known in the region as vinchuca [START_REF] Díaz | Enfermedad de Chagas agudo: transmisión oral de Trypanosoma cruzi como una vía de transmisión re-emergente[END_REF]. There are other forms of contagion, for example: transfusional, congenital, organ transplants, oral and laboratory accident. Chagas disease has two phases: acute and chronic; the first may present without symptoms or with very mild symptoms such as fever, general malaise, swelling of the eyes, swollen area and redness at the site of the bite. If Chagas is not treated in time it can cause cardiovascular, gastrointestinal or neurological disorders. 30% of patients develop heart disease that can trigger death.

Although the outbreaks of Chagas are a concern for the Ministry of Health, so far has not been possible to characterize the environmental macrofactors that condition the reproduction, development and maintenance of the mosquito vector in the country.

Therefore, it has not been possible to identify the risk areas in the country to apply preventive measures to mitigate the effects of the disease in the population and to make a better decision-making.

Seeing the problematic situation of the country with respect to Chagas disease, this project wants to analyze the relationship between the environmental factors and the prevalence of Chagas cases in Bolivia, using meteorological data and Landsat 8 satellite imagery of 2016, to identify the environmental conditions in which the disease is transmitted.

II. CHAGAS IN BOLIVIA

There are 140 species of vinchucas in the world, in Bolivia there are 21 types of vinchucas identified, the most common vinchuca is the Triatoma Infestans, which is responsible for the largest number of Chagas cases recorded in the country. The departments of Tarija, Chuquisaca, show an almost complete dispersion of the vector and the departments of Cochabamba, Santa Cruz, La Paz and Beni show a partial dispersion [START_REF] Brenière | Molecular identification of wild triatomines of the genus Rhodnius in the Bolivian Amazon: Strategy and current difficulties[END_REF].

In Bolivia there are approximately 3 million people infected with Chagas. In 2016 the Ministry of Health of Bolivia recorded 17,892 new cases.

In the department of Santa Cruz, 57.72% of the total cases of chagas were concentrated, followed only by the department of Cochabamba, which concentrated a total of 23.13% of infected persons.

III. SELECTION OF THE STUDY AREA

As described above the Chagas has become an emerging disease in Bolivia, as it has found in the warm departments of the country, such as Santa Cruz, Tarija, Chuquisaca and Cochabamba, the adequate conditions to prevail and transmit the disease.

For the other hand we can also observe that Chagas disease has affected six of the nine departments of Bolivia.

For this reason we must select among the departments of the country the most affected by this viral disease and where there is a high prevalence of cases. [8] For this, the National Program of Preventative and Control of Chagas in Bolivia was revised, where the epidemiological situation of the country in 2016 can be observed. As we can see in the figure, the area selected by the shape in red is our area of interest, where we have three provinces, these are: Andrés Ibañez, Obispo Santistevan and Warnes. Therefore these three provinces will be selected as our study area.

IV. SATELLITE IMAGE PROCESSING

The general block diagram of the present project is shown below: In the previous diagram we can observe the sequence of ordered steps that will help us to achieve the objective of the present research project.

Data acquisition

For the development of this research, different types of data must be acquired, the most crucial is, the number of acute Chagas cases in the study area region during the study period, on the other hand, it will be necessary to supplement these data with data from the meteorological stations located in the provinces of study and finally the satellite images of the department of Santa Cruz.

A. Incidence of Acute Chagas

The Ministry of Health of Bolivia, through its Departmental Health Service (SEDES), in a joint effort of the nine departments of Bolivia, has developed an informatic tool for develope the epidemiological surveillance of vector-borne diseases, including: Dengue, Zika, Chikungunya and the acute Chagas disease. [9] Fig. 8: Epidemiological surveillance tool Source: Ministry of Health of Bolivia This tool allows us to know the number of cases of acute Chagas by department, province and municipality during all the year, in this case the data of 4 months have been collected from July to October of 2016, since these are the months selected to carry out the study. As can be seen in the above table, in total our area of study comprises three provinces and twelve municipalities. It can be observed that the incidence rate of acute Chagas throughout the four months of study is of 3100 confirmed cases during that period. The Landsat 8 satellite carries two instruments: Operational Land Imager (OLI) and the Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS). Of the total of 11 spectral bands, 9 bands are taken by the OLI instrument and 2 bands are taken by the TIRS instrument, in the next table we can see the specifications: Source: USGS-NASA A level 1 scene consists of a radiometrically and geometrically corrected image with 13 files, where 11 files are in GeoTIFF and correspond to each of the 11 recorded bands, one metadata file (MTL) and one more file with a scene quality evaluation (QA).

For download the Landsat 8 images we must enter in the website of USGS (https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/), for download the satellite images we do not need to use special software, as mentioned above is free and allows you to download the images that you want. Initially we look for our area of interest, in this case Santa Cruz, Bolivia: Source: USGS Website

We can filter the images by different criteria, mainly by year, month, percentage of cloudiness and others.

The selected study months are: July, August, September and October of 2016, due to the fact that the other months of the year have a high percentage of cloud coverage of more than 70%, which can lead to erroneous results. Source: Own elaboration

As we can see in the previous image, it was decided to create a shape and crop the satellite image in order to obtain the data only from the area of interest.

Image preprocessing

Due to satellite instruments, different effects can occur that can affect the images acquired, which is why, in order to acquire valid information from our satellite images, different types of corrections must be made in the pre-processing stage, since we need correct the errors that our satellite image acquired when it was exposed to different interferences.

Fig. 1 :

 1 Fig. 1: Incidence of Chagas in South America. Source: Corazones Unidos contra el Chagas

Fig. 2 :

 2 Fig. 2: Chagas disease transmission cycle Source: Argentina Chagas Initiative

Fig. 3 :

 3 Fig. 3: Life Cycle of the Vinchuca. Source: World Health Organization (WHO) 2010 Bolivia is the country with the largest dispersion area of the CH vector (Triatoma Infestans). It is dispersed in approximately 60% of the Bolivian territory. According to figures calculated by WHO in 2010, Bolivia is the country with the highest incidence of Chagas in South America [6].

Fig. 4 :

 4 Fig. 4: Dispersion of the Chagas vector in South America. Source: World Health Organization (WHO) 2010 In the country, three endemic zones were identified: the valley area comprised by the departments of Cochabamba, Chuquisaca, Tarija and Potosí, the Chaco area comprised by the departments of Santa Cruz, Chuquisaca and Tarija, and finally the Amazon area departments of Beni, Pando, part of Santa Cruz, north of La Paz and north of Cochabamba.

Fig. 5 :

 5 Fig. 5: Endemic vector map of Bolivia Source: Ministry of Health of BoliviaAs we can see in the image, the purple squares symbolize the endemic areas where incidence of Chagas, we can see that the vector disease has comprised part of the departments of Santa Cruz, Beni, Cochabamba, La Paz, Sucre and Tarija.The departments of Tarija, Chuquisaca, show an almost complete dispersion of the vector and the departments of Cochabamba, Santa Cruz, La Paz and Beni show a partial dispersion[START_REF] Brenière | Molecular identification of wild triatomines of the genus Rhodnius in the Bolivian Amazon: Strategy and current difficulties[END_REF].In Bolivia there are approximately 3 million people infected with Chagas. In 2016 the Ministry of Health of Bolivia recorded 17,892 new cases.In the department of Santa Cruz, 57.72% of the total cases of chagas were concentrated, followed only by the department of Cochabamba, which concentrated a total of 23.13% of infected persons.

Fig. 6 :

 6 Fig. 6: Map of provinces of Santa Cruz, Bolivia Source: Military Geographic Institute Bolivia

Fig. 7 :

 7 Fig. 7: General block diagram. Source: Own elaboration

B

  . Meteorological data Through the National Service of Meteorology and Hydrology of Bolivia it was possible to identify the meteorological stations installed in the study area. [10] They can be observed in the following figure:

Fig. 9 :

 9 Fig. 9: Location of the weather stations in Bolivia Source: National Service of Meteorology and Hydrology -SENAMHI In total there are six meteorological stations located in the provinces of Obispo Santistevan, Warnes and Andres Ibañes, as we can observe in the next table:

Table

  .

4 :

 4 Selection of weather stations Source: National Service of Meteorology and Hydrology -SENAMHI From the six meteorological stations selected, data of the minimum, maximum and average temperature were obtained; in addition to the average precipitation data of the study area in the selected period of time. C. Satellite Images For this research project we use the satellite imagery from Landsat 8, which is an American terrestrial observation satellite launched on February 11, 2013. It is the eighth and most recent satellite of the Landsat project operated by NASA and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) since 1972. [11]

Fig. 10 :

 10 Fig. 10: Downloading Landsat 8 images.Source: USGS Website

Fig. 11 :

 11 Fig. 11: Making a shape of the study area. Source: Own elaboration

Fig. 12 :

 12 Fig. 12: Preprocessing step block diagram. Source: Own elaboration

Table 1 :

 1 Acute Chagas incidence in Bolivia -2016. Source: National Program of Preventative and Control of Chagas in BoliviaAs we can see in the table the departments of Bolivia with the highest incidence of Chagas cases are three: Santa Cruz, Cochabamba and Tarija. During the year 2016, Santa Cruz presents 10328 cases of Chagas, so we will choose a study area belonging to this department.

Table 2 :

 2 Acute Chagas incidence in Santa Cruz -2016.

Source: National Program of Preventative and Control of Chagas in Bolivia

As we can see in the table above, there are three provinces of the department of Santa Cruz that record the highest incidence rates of acute Chagas in 2016.

Table 3 :

 3 Epidemiological surveillance tool Source: Ministry of Health of Bolivia

Table 5 :

 5 Landsat 8 Satellite Sensor Specifications.

The corrections that will be made in the present project will be explained in the following section.

D. Radiometric correction

This correction is the technique to reconstruct the physically calibrated values by correcting the spectral distortions caused by different reasons like: the instrumental effects due to the calibration, the seasonal changes, the type of terrain that influences the radiation, the sunlight that affects the radiometric values and the scattering effects of the atmosphere, among others. [12] The main purposes of the radiometric correction is to perform a sensor calibration for reduce the red-out effects and improve the sensitivity of the detector, also the calibration wants to reduce the sun angle and topographic effect for reduce the surface slope, finally wants to correct the phenomena caused for the absorption and scattering caused for the Earth's atmosphere.

For this reasons the radiometric correction is really important for this project as we will perform a quantitative image analysis and we know that the improperly calibrated Landsat 8 images may lead us to a wrong conclusion.

E. Geometric correction

The geometric correction is the technique to reproject the radiometrically corrected image onto a common map projection. Also an important step is to georeferencing each pair of pixel in the image with a geographic coordinate of the map. Finally applying these two techniques we will achieve a geocoded product. [13] For this project we will need a totally geometrically corrected image, because for this application we required the absolute locations of the data extracted from the image.

F. Atmospheric correction

The atmospheric correction is the technique of evaluate and eliminate the atmospheric and terrain distortions that are introduced in the values of radiance that arrive at the sensor from the Earth's surface. [14] This with the main objective of recovering the physical parameters of the terrestrial surface including the reflectance of the surface, the visibility of the ground and the temperature. This correction is especially needed for the application of the present project, because it is necessary to compare and analyze images of different dates and taken in different conditions.

Image processing

In the image processing step we will need to extract environmental parameters that are relevant indicators for the study of the epidemiological chain of Chagas disease. For this we need to extract from the satellite images the next parameters: Source: Own elaboration

As we can observe we need to compute the Land Surface Temperature (LST), Relative Humidity, Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI), Normalized Difference Soil Index (NDSI), Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Tasseled Cap index, which is an indicator of greenery, brightness and humidity.

An algorithm was programmed in MATLAB to calculate the above mentioned parameters, the general block diagram of the algorithm was as follows: According to the flow diagram, the programmed algorithm first selects the bands of interest, then reads the metadata file from which it will extract certain constants, then perform the calculations with the programmed equations and finally show heat maps and graphics to be able to analyze the behaviour of the environmental parameters in the different areas of the image.

After compute the environmental parameters of the satellite images of the study area we create a database with all the information acquired in the different stages of the study: Source: Own elaboration As can be observed, the environmental parameters calculated from the image processing step, the meteorological data of the SENAMHI stations located in the study area and finally the data of the incidence of acute Chagas were included.

After the creation of the database, a statistical analysis was performed. The results will be displayed in the next section.

V. ANALYSIS OF RESULTS

The data obtained have been analyzed by statistical tools that allow synthesizing the information, minimizing the loss of information. For this purpose the principal components model was selected to analyze the data.

The variables included in the analysis are detailed in the following table: Source: Own elaboration These variables have been calculated to investigate their effect within the variation of number of cases during the months of analysis. An important effect to which we gave greater presence is the variation of temperature, for this reason we analyzed the maximum and minimum temperature of the period, and the standard deviation of the daily variation of temperature, this parameter is a cause of the variations in the production of the vector and therefore the contagion of the same.

From the analysis of principal components the following table of results was obtained: To maximize the explained variance, the first three components that explain 100% of the variance have been selected. If we add a new component no differences are observed, if we decrease one of the components we lose 12% of the explained variance.

In the following table we show the relationships of each principal component with each variable: From the table we can see that the three components depend on all the measured variables.

Component 1 has a strong positive influence on incidence, temperature, and water stress of vegetation.

Second component has positive influence in important percentage with a NDWI, NDSNI, and temperature variation.

Finally, component 3 is positively related to precipitation and minimum temperature.

VI. CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

• Taking into account that in Bolivia the occurrence of Chagas outbreaks shows an increasing intensity since 2015, this study allow us to have a more integrated understanding of this disease, understand the environmental factors in which the transmission of the disease happens.

• With this proof of concept we can indicate that the incidence of Chagas cases is linked to certain parameters such as: temperature, the water stress of vegetation, water bodies and accumulated precipitation. • A future project pretend create a system that allow us to identify areas with ideal environmental conditions to house the vinchuca in order to plan and apply preventive measures in those places to mitigate the disease, resources and actions should also be planned, impact assessments and even projections can be made in the future to protect the vulnerable population living close to areas where mosquitoes develop.


Ramon Marti Solano

Ramón Martí Solano

Semantic headedness and categorisation of -cumcompounds

Keywords: bound morpheme, headedness, coordination, referentiality, semantic selection

Compounds such as actress-cum-model, pub-cum-hotel or military-cumreligious represent mainly an alternative construction to coordinative compounds of the singer-songwriter type. Although most of them are double-headed, some can show semantic left-headedness. We have detected six main semantic groups out of a corpus of 300 types of -cum-nominal compounds. They correspond, in descending order of frequency, to people's professional or leisure activities; buildings, rooms, and other places; literary and audio-visual genres; pieces of furniture, clothes, and other objects; abstract nouns; and toponyms, and anthroponyms. Under the heading "People", we consider two main subheadings: team-sports players and antonymous occupations or functions.

Introduction

The origin of cum as a combining form in English is related to its use in toponymy, as described in its entry in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and exemplified by the English place names Chorlton-cum-Hardy and Stowcum-Quy.

The first recorded example in the OED of a compound noun dates back to 1871: "He greatly preferred coffee cum chicory to coffee pure and simply.", whereas the first recorded example of a compound adjective is to be found much later, in 1939: "The fervent mediaevalism… developed a philosophiccum-economic tinge."

The difficult-to-grasp linguistic nature of this 'element' has given rise to several contradictory classifications by grammarians, lexicologists and lexicographers and has been described as a preposition, as a combining form or as a bound morpheme. In what follows we adhere to the standpoint of Stein (2000: 281) in that -cum-, in it synchronic use, should be taken as a bound lexical morpheme.

It can link a priori nouns or adjectives from any semantic field but it seems to select a certain number of fields and subfields where it is quite productive. We claim that the recurrence and the productivity of this morphological pattern are the results of a greater need to designate more complex and multi-faceted personalities, realities, functions, relations, concepts and objects.

Research methodology and corpora

In order to account for its presence in different types of register and language varieties we have used several general corpora, namely the British National Corpus (BNC), the Corpus of Contemporary American English (CoCA), the Corpus of Historical American English (CHA) and the Time Corpus (TC) as well as the online archives of The Guardian, The Independent, The New York Times, The New Zealand Herald, The Irish Times, The Economist and The New Statesman. Thus we created a corpus of 335 types chosen at random from all the tokens of the -cum-compounds in the above-mentioned sources.

The online archives of The New York Times have been chosen as the main reference for the simple reason that they allow searches from 1851 to date.

If we do not consider the Latin phrases summa cum laude and magna cum laude, instances of this construction are frequent and abundant, which seems to contradict the statement according to which "This cum is rare in American English, but fairly common in British." (Algeo 1999: 416)

Coordinative compounds and -cum-compounds

Compounds with -cum-represent an alternative construction to copulative compounds which are endocentric, made of two elements belonging to the same lexical category, co-hyponyms and having the same denotatum (Renner 2008: 607). The examples of coordinative compounds discussed by Plag, singer-songwriter, scientist-explorer, poet-translator and hero-martyr, have all "two semantic heads, neither of them being subordinate to the other." (Plag 2003: 146). Coordinative compounds such as these are practically absent in general corpora. The only exception is singersongwriter, which has a meagre 19 occurrences in the CoCA. Interestingly enough, and although we are dealing with two independent semantic heads, the alternative songwriter-singer is non-existent, which shows the high degree of lexicalisation of the former combination. It has been suggested that the preference for singer-songwriter against songwriter-singer-or in the case which concerns us, i.e. their equivalent syndectic compounds singer-cum-songwriter and songwriter-cum-singer-may mirror the preference for the shorter of the two constituents to occupy the first place, thus marking a "syllable number constraint" (Renner, forthcoming).

The semantic relation between each nominal constituent is typically coordinative (two independent heads) but can at times be subordinative, in which case these compounds show left-headedness and a semantic relation that can be glossed as 'combined with' or 'incorporating' as illustrated in the following examples:

(1)

Eazy-E's LA collective were at the forefront, thanks to their aggressive sound and the song-cum-slogan, Fuck tha Police, that made clear the antipathy young urban black people felt towards law enforcement. (The Guardian, 13 June 2011)

(2)

In the minds of design junkies, at least, the trio are synonymous with their award-winning coffee table-cummagazine rack, Mind The Gap (pounds 240). (The Independent, 22 May 1999)

A song-cum-slogan is primarily a song bearing a slogan and a coffee-tablecum-magazine-rack is essentially a coffee-table to which a magazine-rack has been added or joined, so that the right constituent in each case is interpreted as dependent on the first one.

Excepting the examples above and other that will be discussed further down, the coordinative status of most of these compounds is perfectly evident: they belong to the same lexical category-they are both nouns or adjectives-, the constituents have the same denotatum and they can be schematised as follows: X cum Y (cum Z) = X and Y (and Z).

Referentiality

As with other endocentric coordinative compounds -cum-compounds tend to be homoreferential, i.e. they refer to one single entity, either human or non-human, in the extralinguistic world. Although this is mostly true when dealing with combinations of nouns, combinations of adjectives seem to behave rather differently. Adjectives are usually embedded in a noun phrase and can be either homoreferential (Byzantine-cum-Romanesque) or heteroreferential (American-cum-Iraqi):

( The compound in (3) can be analysed as an appositional coordinative compound, whereas the compound in (4) would take the label of participative coordinative compound (Bauer 2006: 496).

One of the most salient traits of these compounds is the fact that in general corpora types are rather numerous if one compares them to the number of tokens that amount just to one or two at the most. This observation leads us to the question of monoreferentiality or compounds having a number of tokens corresponding all to the same denotatum. Compounds are said to be monoreferential when they are exclusively used in relation to one and the same person, usually a well-known public figure, although in some cases they may refer to institutions or political parties. All the tokens of postmancum-politician or media magnate-cum-premier refer respectively to Olivier Besancenot and Silvio Berlusconi. 1 Party-cum-militia is a compound systematically applied to Hezbollah. In this sense, monoreferentiality is particularly closely related to hapax legomena or nonce-forms.

Headedness and semantic relations of constituents

As a general rule, nominal -cum-compounds are double-headed and constitute a unique referential unit, as is the case with their asyndetic counterparts (Bisetto & Scalise 2005: 10). This double-headedness has also been referred to as hybridization, "whereby the compounded concept is understood as a cross (or a conjunction) between its two constituent concepts" (Baroni et al. 2007: 265).

However, several compounds in our corpus cannot be analysed as doubleheaded but rather as left-headed since the second coordinand is semantically subordinate to the first one. This is the case of airplanes-cum-missiles in (5).

The combination acquires an idiosyncratic meaning and the interpretation necessarily depends on the context:

(5) Dozens of other structures in Lower Manhattan had also been damaged by debris from the twin towers and the airplanescum-missiles that had destroyed them. (The New York Times,

21 March 2011)
The range of possible meanings is relatively small with this type of compounds if one compares them with, for instance, exocentric compounds.

Nevertheless, in order to understand airplanes-cum-missiles not only does one need linguistic information but also contextual information as to be able to exclude other possible interpretations such as 'airplanes carrying missiles'.

Other instances of a left semantic head in -cum-compounds correspond to people or places interpreted as having a major function (head) and an ancillary one (non-head).

Notice, however, that not all coordinative compounds are clearly dvandva. In the Italian prete-operaio 'priest worker', the semantic head seems to be solely the first constituent, since the usual interpretation of the word is a priest who, in addition to being a priest, has another occupation. (Scalise & Fabregas 2010: 121) Examples in our corpus of the 'prete-operaio' type include cook-cumwriter, factory-cum-showroom, lawyer-cum-fitness enthusiast, school-cumcamp, soap opera-cum-sex and lounge-cum-television.

Exceptionally, -cum-compounds may even refer to two concomitant and consecutive events or actions: Furthermore, the constituents may not necessarily be co-hyponyms: they can belong, for instance, to entirely different professional spheres (e.g.

cricketer-cum-politician) or even be exact or approximate antonyms (e.g.

rival-cum-partner, ally-cum-rival, adversary-cum-lover).

Semantic categorisation

Stein establishes four distinct semantic categories in which her 25 -cum-

compounds

_____________________________________________________________

Under the heading "People's professional or leisure activities", we consider two main subheadings: "team-sports players" and "antonymous occupations or functions".

People's professional or leisure activities

This bound morpheme is primarily used in our corpus to join together two or more lexemes designating people's jobs or activities (e.g. actress-cumactivist, model-cum-singer, historian-cum-diver).To a lesser extent, one of the nominal constituents may refer to people performing other nonprofessional functions (e.g. father-cum-boss, nurse-cum-mother, financial advisor-cum-boyfriend).

Team-sports players

Sports journalists and commentators, usually inclined to language innovation and creativity, seem to favour this type of compounding. It is undoubtedly in rugby where -cum-compounds are more profuse (e.g. -cum-lock, outhalf-cum-centre, fullback-cum-wing) as well as in football (e.g. defender-cum-winger, centre-half-cum-midfielder). However, a further research in The New Zealand Herald has shown the use of these compounds in other team sports such as netball (shooter-cum-defender).

backrower

Antonymous occupations or functions

A second subgroup in which the nominal constituents have people as referents is particularly apparent. The bound morpheme selects, in this case, antonymous or quasi-antonymous lexemes and marks a semantic relation which could apparently seem contradictory with the internal complementarity inherent in these compounds (e.g. friend-cum-enemy, rival-cum-ally, adversary-cum-lover). The recourse to this construction clearly reveals a need to express a complex, double-edged human entity in the form of a composite word.

Buildings, rooms and other places

Second to people are compounds referring to places having multiple purposes. All sorts of combinations are theoretically possible but the types in our corpus mainly relate to hotels, bars, restaurants, shops and special types of lodging (e.g. restaurant-cum-deli, store-cum-gallery, apartmentcum-office).

A search in The New York Times online archives shows that the most frequent combinations of places are those under the template bar-cum-X.

The next most frequent combinations are those starting with the words restaurant, store, café, apartment and hotel. These results illustrate the importance of this construction mainly for public places. Combinations of rooms in a house having a double function or a space integrating two traditional separate rooms are less frequent (kitchen-cum-X only yields 17 results compared to 173 for bar-cum-X).

Literary / journalistic / music / film / television genres

One could say that the latest novel by David Lodge A Man of Parts is a "novel-cum-biography-cum-interview" and in fact this concatenation of nouns seems to be the tendency when describing or commenting on certain pieces of writing. This way of compounding is clearly favoured for the designation of more multi-layered and complex subgenres that need to be referred to in a more specific and precise manner as a single concept. The examples found in our corpus correspond to several and distinct professional fields ranging from literature to the film and television industry and extending as far as music or poetry (e.g. biography-cum-travelogue, review-cum-sketch, melodrama-cum-farce, novel-cum-screenplay).

A special case is exemplified by the compound documentary-cum-drama.

This combination is clearly preferred to the reversed form drama-cumdocumentary. The compound noun drama documentary and the blend docudrama are both registered in dictionaries such as the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary (CALD). Although there are two lexicalised forms for the same denotatum, this does not hinder the development and use of the corresponding -cum-compound as a variant form.

Machines, pieces of furniture, clothes and other objects

Disparate and heterogeneous objects are to be found under this category (e.g. diary-cum-scrapbook, jumpsuit-cum-bodystocking, guitar-cumharmonica). There is as well a tendency for these compounds to refer to newly-designed objects as well as to state-of-the-art technological gadgets (e.g. identity card-cum-bank card, computer-cum-printer). The dual purpose of these objects is well represented by, for instance, a walking-stick-cumseat. The preferred order of the nominal constituents reveals the fact that we are dealing with a walking stick that can eventually be transformed into a chair when the rambler or the hunter needs to rest for a while. The semantic head is not any walking stick: the non-head constrains the pragmatics and the resulting compound is only to be found in certain contexts, such as rambling, hunting and so forth, showing thus a restricted pattern of usage.

Abstract nouns

These compounds represent either the combination of opposite concepts or principles (e.g. democracy-cum-socialism, innocence-cum-diabolism or illusions-cum-sorrows) or the combination of synonymous or quasi-synonymous terms (communism-cum-socialism 2 , recession-cum-depression, preoccupations-cum-obsessions). One can state that the bound morpheme serves a double purpose in this category, namely selecting and marking either a synonymous or an antonymous semantic relation between the coordinands.

Toponyms and anthroponyms

Examples from our corpus such as Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Prestwich-cum-Oldham and Upton-cum-Chalvey represent a very small and closed set of toponyms that clearly fall out of the mainstream semantic categorisation. On the contrary, continents, countries and other prominent place names can be potentially constituents of -cum-compounds and appear in embedded constructions, as illustrated by the example from our corpus Northern-Ireland-cum-Great-Britain arrangement. In this case the compound is heteroreferential and participative.

As far as anthroponyms are concerned, they are all embedded and heteroreferential. (Marx-cum-Freud, Pushkin-cum-Tchaikovsky, Whitmancum-Thomas):

(7) Steeped in a Marx-cum-Freud conviction that no man can "resist history, environment, class structure, psychic conditioning," the realists take for granted that all oases which spring from mere individual initiative are sure to be mirages. (Time, 15 August 1949)

Adjectives

Adjectives represent 10.4% of the total number of types in our corpus.

Compound adjectives with -cum-are generally relational (e.g. nationalcum-regional, social-cum-political). The latter can be analysed as a variant form of the corresponding suppletive independent lexeme only used for compounding, i.e. socio-in socio-political (Montermini 2010: 89).

Instances of embedded relational adjectives such as corporate-cumnationalist society, fictional-cum-biographical treatment, literary-cumsocial criticism, religious-cum-political discourse or scientific-cumtechnical expertise are not scarce and represent a compact morphological solution to syntactic constructions such as, for instance, "a discourse which is both religious and political" or "a literary and social criticism".

Conclusions

The English bound morpheme -cum-is used as a linker of nouns or adjectives. The nominal compounds can be classified under six different categories, being principally used for combining people and places. It serves as a template for innovative creations in such unrelated fields as team sports or literary genres. Although relatively recent in the history of the language this type of compounds is getting more and more pervasive, especially in journalistic discourse. Their expansion is mainly due to their readiness and compactness to refer to increasingly complex realities in a globalised everchanging world. Juxtaposing heterogeneous, even incompatible, elements is a distinctive trait of some of these compounds. This template is thus a straightforward way of marrying or reconciling two culture-specific different or contradictory concepts such as democracy and socialism.

  . It must be stated that Algeo's analysis is based on the scrutiny of the British component of the International Corpus of English and that he classifies cum as a Briticism. A quick survey in the archives of the main broadsheets in the USA, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand gives a totally different overview of the phenomenon. Examples of -cum-compounds are numerous and recurrent and fairly well established in all these language varieties.

  3) Last week the Rt. Rev. Horace Donegan, Episcopal Bishop of New York, announced that the diocese was scrapping the ambitious Gothic plan drawn up in 1911 by Architect Ralph Adams Cram. He in turn had drastically revised the original Byzantine-cum-Romanesque church whose cornerstone was laid in 1892. (Time, 12 February 1966) (4) In the precinct of Nazal-one of Falluja's nine, each with a joint American-cum-Iraqi police station-locals watch warily as a dozen helmeted young American marines, their guns pointed at […] (The Economist, 13 December 2007)

  cum-release of the detainees is a tricky part of the Americans' exit strategy, stirring strong emotions. (The Economist, 7 May 2009) Unlike in (6), the expected order in the compounds suicide-cum-murder and strike-cum-lock-out has been inverted as actions are regarded from the perspective of the present point in time.

Olivier Besancenot was the former political leader of the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (New Anticapitalist Party), a far-left political party in France.

Let us signal that for the vast majority of American citizens, the term 'socialism' is synonymous or, at least, very close semantically to the term 'communism' and therefore irreconcilable with the concept of 'democracy'.

Cross-Disciplinary Issues in Compounding ed. by Sergio Scalise & Irene Vogel, 109-126. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Stein, Gabriele. 2000. "The function of word-formation and the case of English -cum-". Words: Structure, Meaning, Function ed. by Ch. Dalton-Puffer & N. Ritt, 277-288. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. TC = Time Corpus, http://corpus2.byu.edu/time/.

The Economist, http://www.economist.com/.

The Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/.

The Independent, http://www.independent.co.uk/.

The Irish Times, http://www.irishtimes.com/.

The New Statesman, http://www.newstatesman.com/.

The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/.

The New Zealand Herald, http://www.nzherald.co.nz/.


Martí Ramón

Solano

From idiom variants to open-slot idioms: close-ended and open-ended variational paradigms

Keywords: idiom variant, open-slot idiom, lexicographic treatment, variational paradigm

There is a cline between idiom variants and open-slot idioms in English: from blow a fuse/gasket in which the nominal constituent admits only a single substitution to wear your heart on your sleeve in which the noun group your heart is actually instantiated by a plethora of other nouns or noun groups making of this multi-word unit an open-slot idiom with an open-ended variational paradigm. Variation is regularly signalled in general dictionaries and in dictionaries of idioms by means of different typographical marks such as oblique strokes or commas or by including a note in the body of the article. On the contrary, not all lexicographers indicate the information concerning an open paradigm of variant forms in the entry or the body of the article of open-slot idioms whose phraseographic status is hard to delimit or grasp.

Introduction

A great number of idioms are varied when used in discourse, although a clear line should be drawn between regular (or lexicalised) variation, contextual variation, manipulation or exploitation of multi-word units and open-slot idioms. Idiom variants are usually represented by the alternation of two (or even sometimes three or four) nominal, verbal or adjectival constituents having attained lexicalised status and being recorded as such in dictionaries of idioms. Hit the road/trail, fit as a fiddle/flea, go for the jugular/throat are instances of idioms with lexicalised nominal variants. Idioms with verbal variants such as up/raise the ante, upset/overturn the applecart, fly/show/wave the flag are regularly registered in general dictionaries and dictionaries of idioms as are idioms with adjectival variants such as a passing/nodding acquaintance, hard/hot on your heels or plain/clear/smooth/easy sailing. Prepositions and adverbial particles can also alternate in a number of idioms, as shown in such dictionary entries as fray at/around the edges, like death warmed up/over or green about/around/at the gills. All these variant forms are usually represented by means of oblique strokes and may be registered or not in dictionaries depending on the personal choice of each lexicographer.

A second type of regular variation includes those entries in which a more or less openended paradigm is provided, as is the case with inserted adjectives. This lexicographic practice shows that the expression in question is generally instantiated with an inserted adjective, although no clear guidelines are given as to the type or exact number of adjectives except for the actual adjectives found both in the entry and in the examples, as illustrated by the following dictionary entry from the Longman Idioms Dictionary (LID):

2 (also cast a critical, professional etc eye over) to look at something, or consider something, in a particular way: She took care with the arrangements, knowing that her mother would cast a critical eye over them. | Gavin has agreed to cast an expert eye over our programme. (LID) Finally, dictionaries may choose to record idioms with no explicit variant or group of variants but rather lemmatised with a slot, signalled by an underscore, that may occupy an initial, medial or final position, as shown respectively by ___ to a fault, too ___ for words and do sth under the banner of ___. More than one slot is also possible, as with the phrases ___ with a capital ___ and once a ___ always a ___. Rarely do general dictionaries apply this lexicographic technique, which is reserved especially to a small number of dictionaries of idioms.

Types of phraseological variation

Multi-word units can vary in many different ways and this variation may concern pragmatics, semantics, syntax, lexicology and even morphology. In the present study I will be mostly dealing with lexical variation. Lexical variants of phraseological units are the product of three distinct processes, namely lexical substitution, lexical insertion and lexical truncation.

As regards open-slot idioms, they are the product either of substitution or insertion but not of truncation:

Recurrent and systematic variation may result in PhUs having their entry forms altered in general dictionaries and dictionaries of idioms. The insertion of an adjective may eventually become so common and widespread that certain PhUs can be considered as having an open slot in their lexicographic form, as is the case with cut your teeth which is recorded by the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary (CALD) as Cut your political/professional, etc. teeth and defined as 'to get your first experience of the type mentioned'. The definition itself represents a clear sign of the semantic openness of this string which is normally instantiated with the insertion of a qualifying adjective that specifies and restricts its sphere of application delimiting its referential scope. (Martí Solano 2011: 391) Adjectives that were formally inserted as a means of contextualisation of certain phraseological units have become so widespread that the original shorter versions are less and less found in corpora. What was once optional becomes, by recurrence, a semi-obligatory constituent without which the holistic meaning of the string seems to go out of its depth. The string keep an eye on is usually instantiated by means of the inclusion of an adjective, since it has become too general a phrase and speakers feel the need to qualify with more precision its holistic meaning. The qualification process is only syntactically possible by means of the insertion of an adjective before the only nominal constituent, as illustrated by the following examples:

(1) The trouble with that position is that the theatre itself is much less highminded than those who keep a watchful eye on its purity. (The Guardian, 24 November 2004)

(2) Even so, just as it is as well to keep a careful eye on those leaders with a taste for writing poetry, so an enthusiasm for architecture is a characteristic that (…) (The Observer, 29 May 2005)

(3) "Speak has a legitimate right to make their views known to people, but we will be keeping a close eye on anybody crossing the line." (The Guardian, 30 December 2004)

Phraseological variation and dictionaries of idioms

In order to cover a wider spectrum of lexicographic sources I have used seven dictionaries of idioms, namely A Dictionary of American Idioms (DAI), the Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms (CIDI), the Collins Cobuild Dictionary of Idioms (CCDI), the Longman Idioms Dictionary (LID), the Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English. 1 shows the rather personal and arbitrary selection of entries. idioms and that they cannot be taken as definitive. However, on comparing them, there is only one item in common, that is ___ to a fault. It seems that a more conservative approach to phraseography finds it hard to include gaps in the lemmatised entries of idioms, as this practice would convey a feeling of instability, vagueness, a kind of lexical no-man's-land to the dictionary users, hence the choice of head phrases such as too close for comfort, as guilty/miserable/ugly as sin, etc. in most dictionaries of idioms.

The LID, in its turn, includes an important number of idioms labelled 'spoken' such as City and the Giants sounds fishy to me." As a result, one can state that lexicographic practices in this respect are inconsistent and that the same criterion is not always applied or respected.

Open-slot idioms

If we consider the examples given by both the ODI and the LID, we can define openslot idioms, from a phraseographic point of view, as those strings recorded by some dictionaries of idioms in which one or several constituents have been elided. As far as dictionary users are concerned, these slots can be filled with an open-ended paradigm of the word class (usually a noun, an adjective or a verb) that fits in semantically and syntactically in the open slot.

Open-slots as qualifiers

Several types of open-slot idioms have been identified according to formal and semantic criteria as well as to the extent of their variational paradigms. For space reasons, I will only be dealing with a small number of the selections of idioms listed above. A first group includes those expressions used as qualifiers either of on object or of a person. The lemmatisation of this unit in the CALD as a slip of a sth is at odds with the example provided after its definition, I knew her when she was a slip of a girl, since the nominal constituent is "girl" and obviously is not "something", which is quite misleading for foreign learners as they might expect an object and not a person as the slot-filler. On the contrary, ADJ + as sin (as recorded in the ODI) would not be considered an open-slot idiom but rather an idiom with a restricted variational paradigm. This fact is clearly recorded by the CIDI in which this string is lemmatised as "as guilty/miserable/ugly as sin", with a close-ended variational paradigm. By the same token, an item such as ____ in residence, as it is recorded in the ODI, would not be considered an open-slot as the paradigm is very limited and concerns a small group of nouns such as writer, poet, artist, composer and the like.

Open-slots as themes

Some open-slot idioms, generally those having the slot at the end, are filled in by the theme, which is the noun or the noun phrase which encapsulates the new information in the sentence and represents its focus. What price ____? is the choice made by the ODI for the entry of this idiom that is lemmatised in the CIDI as What price fame/victory/success, etc?

The lexicographer's choice of nouns implies that variants should include nouns denoting very positive situations. This is not always the case when occurrences of the string are searched in online newspaper archives, as illustrated in ( 5) and ( 6):

( Again, this is a conversational formula rather than an idiom.

Open-slots as arguments

Predicate or phrasal idioms are made up of a verb plus an argument usually realised as Do sth under the banner of ____, as this idiom is lemmatised in the ODI, represents a clear example of an idiom with an external constituent rather than an open-slot idiom. The combination does not even have its own entry in the CALD, where it appears in the example of the third subentry of the noun banner:

a
3.

[ S ] an idea, principle or belief that is strongly supported by someone They won the election under the banner of lower taxes.

This lexicographic treatment does not give idiom status to this combination, which should be interpreted as a colligation. The word is used figuratively to mean "idea", "principle" or "belief" and the supporting example is provided simply to show the prepositions used in the syntactic frame.

Open-slots as delimiters

The The heart stands for feelings, emotions and passions in English lexis and phraseology as in a large number of other languages and cultures in the world, so one would expect that the paradigm of nouns should include items particularly related to those semantic fields.

However, the feelings and emotions that are encapsulated in the analysable phraseological constituent heart have clearly been expanded and diversified to include five main types of domains, namely "feelings" (emotions, vulnerability, influences), "religion" (faith, Christianity, atheism), "nationality" (roots, identity, heritage, patriotism), "politics" (political affiliation, political colours) and "cultural preferences" (classic influences, literary passions, intellectual interests, intellectualism):

(9) "Speedy", as he is known, is currently rushing merrily around the Not only is the nominal constituent book replaced by a synonym or quasi-synonym as in ( 11) but the whole prepositional complement can be substituted by an unpredictable range of noun phrases, as shown in ( 11) and (13).

Open-slot sayings and proverbs

Although proverbs are regarded as one of the most fixed types of phraseological units, they can be manipulated and give rise to antiproverbs, remotivation and other types of exploitation:

Exploitation is sometimes so common that it forces reconsideration of the 'canonical' form of the FEI. For example, all tokens in OHPC of the proverb beauty is in the eye of the beholder are exploited: […] The syntagmatic structure of the proverb remains intact, and the first example certainly refers explicitly to the original form, but the persistence of exploitation and substitution suggests that the canonical form of this FEI should be __ is in the eye of the beholder, with an open slot in subject position to be filled by any abstract that is considered essentially subjective. (Moon 1998a: 172)

A very small number of sayings and proverbs can therefore be considered as openslots, as for instance Once a _____ always a _____ in which both slots are filled with the same lexical item. A search in the CoCA for slot-fillers has yielded the following results:

spook, senator, prostitute, junkie, cheater and bishop. The semantic prosody of the variational paradigm is in this case clearly negative. The range of variants is rather small since, as a general rule, proverbs and sayings are thinly represented in general corpora and therefore their degree of frequency is usually low or very low. This type of open-slots is illustrated in examples ( 14), ( 15) and ( 16):

Volume 2 :

 2 Phrase, Clause & Sentence Idioms (ODCIE2), the Oxford Dictionary of Idioms (ODI) and the American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms (AHDI). Only the ODI and the LID do actually make use of the open-slot lexicographic practice in a regular although unmethodical way. Despite the fact that criteria for the lemmatisation of open-slot idioms as such vary from one lexicographer to another, the random selection of examples in Table

(

  now) that's what I call ___, roll on ___, talk about ___ or ___ isn't the word for it which are actually conversational formulas with a compulsory open slot rather than idioms. It is interesting to notice that this same dictionary registers sth smells fishy (also sth seems, sounds etc fishy) instead of using an open-slot for the first constituent. On scrutinizing the examples found in this entry one clearly understands the reason behind this lexicographic choice: sth is instantiated by a long and rather complex noun phrase, as shown in one of the examples provided after the definition: "The latest proposal to split the cost of the stadium between the

5 )

 5 One of the bizarre examples has been the parents of dead children whose organs were removed complaining bitterly that they have only been given£1,000, while the Alder Hey parents got £5,000. What price children's organs?(The Guardian, 20 February 2004) (6) In New Zealand he may find out that he is not only behind Jones in the pecking order but also behind Wilkinson, whom I strongly suspect 1 Hunston (1995: 137) summarises the notion of semantic prosody as follows: "Briefly, a word may be said to have a particular semantic prosody if it can be shown to co-occur typically with other words that belong to a particular semantic set."(Hunston & Francis 2000: 104) price some dissension if results go against the Lions? (The Guardian, 23 May 2005) However, other theme-related open-slot idioms can be instantiated by means of a totally open paradigm of nouns or noun phrases. The string Bang goes ____ is one of these cases. The phrase is lemmatised as bang goes sth in the CIDI and as an open-slot in the LID.

  notion of delimiters in phraseological variation theory was first used by Ernst in 1981 (see references). "Domain delimiters"(Ernst 1981: 51) are generally inserted adjectives, although sometimes they can be nouns with an adjectival function, that delimit the referential scope of idioms to a particular domain, sphere or field, as illustrated in the following examples: turn back the moral clock, lose the domestic plot, the crest of the economic wave, beat about the academic bush, bang the human rights drum, etc.When cases of idioms with domain delimiters are searched in lexicographic works some sort of mismatch may arise between the head phrase and the examples provided after the definition. Strike a note is lemmatised as an invariable idiom in the CIDI even though the two examples make use of an internal modification which is signalled by the use of a bold type: strike a note to express and communicate a particular opinion or feeling about something I find it really difficult to strike the right note when I'm writing job applications. At the end of her speech, she struck a note of warning about the risks involved in the project.The string is thus instantiated under the following two schemas: strike a ____ note and strike a note of ____. The slot-fillers for the first schema in the BNC are, among others, sad, prophetic, discordant, victory, sombre and responsive. In the CoCA the slot-fillers are positive, cautionary, familiar, whimsical, triumphant, surprising, strong, nautical, jarring, false, different and deep.The phrase put sth/sb on the map can be said to have two different types of slots. The first one is compulsory and corresponds to the direct object and the second one is optional and serves as a domain delimiter. In order to investigate the potential range of the variational paradigm, different searches have been made both in the BNC and the CoCA and the results are set up in Table2:Table2. Variational paradigm of put sb/sth on the map in the BNC and is mainly filled in with things, places or institutions rather than with people. On the other hand, the optional slot is filled in mainly with adjectives or nouns that function as delimiters that restrict the large sphere represented by the nominal constituent map.The phrase jump/climb/leap/get on the bandwagon is usually lemmatised with a number of verb variants, as the entry in the CIDI amply shows. 2 However, forty-one occurrences have been found in the BNC, out of which seven correspond to the open-slot variant schema on the + NOUN + bandwagon, two to the schema on the + NOUN PHRASE + bandwagon and seven to the schema on the + ADJ + bandwagon. (7) Too many celebrities are getting on the health bandwagon and producing ill-conceived "fitness" manuals. (BNC) (8) As for the so-called foresters who jumped on the tax-avoidance bandwagon and ruined our moorlands, then I hope (…) (BNC) One of the most prolific open-slot idioms happens to be wear your heart on your sleeve. This phrase epitomises the notion of inanalysability of the nominal constituent heart.

  country in a showy bid to save his colleagues from defeat. He wears his presidential ambitions on his sleeve. (The Guardian, 24 March 2004) (10) The new champion is a descendant of Sir Logan Campbell, a Scottish emigre who became mayor of Auckland in the 19th century, but he has always worn his heritage on his sleeve. (The Guardian, 21 June 2005) Another similar case, although not as prolific as the previous one, is take a leaf out of sb's book. A search in the online archives of The Guardian has yielded actualisations such as the following showing clear evidence of an open-ended paradigm: (11) Taking a leaf out of Skins's character-per-week structure, the second episode hones in on Nathan. He's ended up with the double blow of being kicked out of home (…) (The Guardian, 7 July 2010) (12) They were undone only when Spurs took a leaf out of the Bolton style guide to claim their second equaliser with a goal from a set piece, Niko Kranjcar's corner (…) (The Observer, 3 October 2009) (13) The Arts Council's basis for making judgments on artistic merit (…)Here, the arts system could consider taking a leaf out of the scientific and academic worlds and adopting a process of peer reviews.(The Guardian, 21 December 2007)

( 14 )

 14 One thinks of Truffaut's famous letter in which he suggested that ifGodard ever made an autobiographical film, the appropriate title might be Once a Shit, Always a Shit. (The Guardian, 29 April 2005) (15) "Once a Wasp, always a Wasp" is the club's proud boast and Green will remain a part (…) (The Guardian, 13 May 2005) (16) Once a Raj orphan, always a Raj orphan. In Jane Gardam's superb new novel, Sir Edward Feathers, (…) (The Guardian, 20 November 2004) The traditional proverb One man's meat is another man's poison is another example of a paired parallel phrase that has become an open-slot proverb. Only three examples have been found in the CoCA, all of them from the spoken part of the corpus: (17) Well, Harry, you know the old saying "one man's trash is another man's treasure", and that is very much the case here. (CoCA) (18) They did that because they wanted us to write about their relentlessness in pursuit of terrorism and their successes. You know, one man's breach of security is another man's public relations. (CoCA) (19) And on amazon.com, one of the major indicators of a title's performance, "XXX" ranked for weeks in the top 100. As they say, one man's pornography is another man's art. (CoCA) 5. Conclusions Open-slot idioms seem not to be entirely accepted by lexicographers as they are only recorded by a small number of them. Most dictionaries of idioms prefer to lemmatise open slots by means of strings of variant forms in the head phrase and/or by including them in the examples provided after the definition. Printing inserted elements in bold type in the examples is another means of avoiding the slot in the head phrase. Only the Longman Idioms Dictionary (LID) and the Oxford Dictionary of Idioms (ODI) do make use of slots, although both their actual selection and theoretical criteria appear to be arbitrary and unmethodical. The fondness for the inclusion of spoken fixed phrases, mainly conversational formulae and other discourse structuring devices, could explain in part the abundance of open-slots in these two dictionaries of idioms. Although several types of open-slot idioms have been identified according to semantic, syntactic and discursive functions of the potential variational paradigm, a much larger sample would definitely be necessary to account for the extent and typology of this phraseological phenomenon.

Table 1 . A sample of open-slot idioms as lemmatised in the ODI and the LID ODI LID

 1

	___ as sin	(now) that's what I call ___
	___ from hell	___ city
	___ in residence	___ is a two-way street
	___ to a fault	___ isn't the word for it
	___ your head off	___ to a fault
	___ your socks off	___ with a capital ___
	___'s-eye view	a (wet) paper bag
	a peach of a ___	a ___ of the first water
	a slip of a ___	bang goes ___
	on the ___ side	be ___ at heart
	once a ___, always a ___	do sth under the banner of ___
	scratch a ___ and find a ___	on the ___ front
	strike (or sound) a ___ note	roll on ___
	the poor man's ___	sb couldn't ___ his/her way out of
	the rocky road to ___	so ___ it's not even funny
	the sick man of ___	talk about ___
	too ___ for comfort	the ___ of sb's dreams
	too ___ for words
	what price ___?

too ___ by half wise in the ways of ___ who's she ___ the cat's mother? you can't beat ___ It is obvious that the two lists above are but a sample of a larger set of open-slot

  Thesecan have an open slot for a noun (a peach of a + NOUN, a slip of a + NOUN, an armchair + NOUN) or for an adjective (ADJ + to a fault, too ADJ for words).A search in the online archives of The New York Times has yielded the following results, which are obviously not complete or definitive but rather indicative of an open-ended paradigm: the slot in the schema a peach of a + NOUN is filled with a variety of nouns such as show,person, place, deal, fellow, time, film, movie, car, dress, tune, shot, performance, etc.

	showing a wide range of possible candidates, both /human/ and /non-human/, whose
	excellence is highly praised.

A slip of a + NOUN is another qualifying expression that indicates smallness in a positive way. It is labelled 'old-fashioned' in the Cambridge Advances Learner's Dictionary (CALD) and this is corroborated in (4) by the interpolated clause which follows the phrase in bold type:

(4) In another way, I'm not, because Sheherazade is such a slip of a girl, as your grandmother might say, that for a moment I wonder if we've got the wrong 300-acre estate (…)

(The Observer, 7 November 2004)

  The CoCA has yielded a total of 20 results with a larger set of nouns such as girl,thing, woman, smile, lass, lad, dress, boy, etc. including not only nouns referring to (young) people but also to objects. ,good-natured, consistent, earnest, impartial, neutral, rational, cautious, measured, humble, courteous, liberal and solicitous. The semantic prosody 1 of this variational paradigm is clearly positive, which is borne out by the definition provided by the CIDI:

	be kind/generous, etc. to a fault
	to be extremely kind/generous, etc
	She's a really sweet person and she's generous to a fault.
	The results in the New York Times for the schema an armchair + NOUN represent an
	open-ended paradigm of nouns designating professions, occupations or persons with a
	particular set of beliefs such as cook, strategist, navigator, official, psychologist, Bolshevist,
	constitutionalist, anthropologist or traveler.

Only 6 results have been found in the BNC for this string either in combination with girl or lad or child.

Concerning idioms with an open slot for adjectives, the undisputed winner is ADJ + to a fault. I have found, among others, the following slot-fillers

: honest, unselfish, loyal, generous, fashionable, efficient, self-involved, impeccable, faultless, indulgent, slapstick, vital

This phrase is usually recorded taking into account the degree of variability of its verbal component. As a result, it is common to find several synonymous or quasi-synonymous verbs as part of the lemmatised form. However, no mention of its immense potentiality of variability through lexical insertion is made in dictionary description except for the fact that the vast majority of the examples illustrative of the phrase tend to include an extraneous lexical item.(Martí Solano, 2011:

398)

British National Corpus. http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/x.asp. (BNC) Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary. 2008. Good, Melissa (ed.). 3 rd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (CALD) Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms. 2005. Walter, Elizabeth (ed.). 7 th edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (CIDI) Collins Cobuild Dictionary of Idioms. 2002. Seaton, Maggie; Macaulay, Alison (eds). 2 nd edition. Glasgow: HarperCollins. (CCDI) Corpus of Contemporary American English. http://www.americancorpus.org/. (CoCA) Cowie, Anthony, P. et al. 1983. Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English. Volume 2: Phrase, Clause & Sentence Idioms. 1 st edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (ODCIE2) Ernst, Theodore. 1981. Grist for the linguistic mill: idioms and 'extra' adjectives. Journal of Linguistic Research. 1/3: 51-68. Hunston Susan; Francis G. 2000. Pattern Grammar. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hunston, Susan. 1995. A corpus study of some English verbs of attribution. Functions of Language. 2: 133-158. Longman Idioms Dictionary. 1998. Engineer, Sue (ed.). 1 st edition. Harlow: Longman. (LID) Martí Solano, Ramόn. 2011. Phraseological Units in English: variation through lexical insertion. Rassegna Italiana di Linguistica Applicata. 1/2: 389-404. Moon, Rosamund. 1998. Fixed Expressions and Idioms in English: A Corpus-based Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oxford Dictionary of Idioms. 2004. Siefring, Judith (ed.). 2 nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (ODI) The Guardian & The Observer. http://www.guardian.co.uk/. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/.

Summary

Although traditionally regarded as fixed phrases, idioms do actually vary a great deal. Some of these idiom variants may become institutionalised and eventually be lemmatised in dictionary entries. Thus, cases of lexical variation such as hard/hot on your heels or break fresh/new ground represent one end of the cline of a closeended variational paradigm. Sometimes inserted adjectives can become so pervasive that they may be included in a dictionary entry as with cut your political/professional, etc. teeth in the Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms (CIDI). Finally, at the other end of the cline we find examples such as wear your heart on your sleeve, frequently instantiated by the substitution of its nominal component heart by an extensive paradigm, which perfectly exemplifies the ongoing process of variation through substitution and which is definitely an open-slot idiom even though it is not registered as such in general dictionaries and dictionaries of idioms. The analysability of the component heart can explain the use of nouns such as emotions or feelings but would certainly not account for other occurrences such as Christianity, presidential ambitions or heritage. As is also the case with take a leaf out of somebody's book, some phraseological units are usually varied by means of the substitution of one of the noun phrases by others being or not semantically related and hence constitute clear instances of openslot idioms. It is mainly the Oxford Dictionary of Idioms (ODI) and the Longman Idiom Dictionary (LID) that lemmatise some of their entries as open-slots by eliding the variable component and replacing it with a gap. For instance, with a capital A/B etc. and rocky road are the canonical forms in the CIDI whereas _______ with a capital _______ and the rocky road to _______ are the head phrases in the LID and the ODI respectively.