An Indonesian idiomatic zoo: profiling the distribution of animal idiomatic expressions in an Indonesian corpus

Idiomatic expressions in a language may include animals, for instance, ‘scape goat ’, as one of the compositional elements. In this project, we study animal idiomatic expressions in Indonesian, such as cinta monyet (lit. monkey love) ‘puppy love’, tikus kantor (lit. office rat) ‘corruptor’, and kupu-kupu malam (lit. night butterfly) ‘prostitutes’. We aim to understand their empirical distributions, degrees of ambiguity, and sentiments. Corpus approaches are used in the data collection and analysis. Combining data-driven and introspective methods, we create a corpus query that we apply to the LCC Indonesian 2023 CQPweb version, a large Indonesian corpus. Most expressions are highly idiomatic with moderate frequencies; negative sentiments are overwhelming. No statistically significant associations are found between sentiment and specific animal types. The corpus-based insights we offer contribute to understanding how animal idiomatic expressions function in Indonesian may support cross-linguistic idiom studies and semantic analysis.