How flexible are idioms? A corpus-based study

Abstract

Abstract Idioms are a compelling subject of study for linguists, lexicographers and psycholinguists due to their seemingly idiosyncratic status as lexical units that pose challenges for integration into accepted grammatical frameworks. The literature reveals much disagreement on the semantic compositionality, syntactic flexibility and lexical variation of both specific idioms and idioms as a class. We analyze some of the sources for the disparate analyses, which are most often based on judgments of constructed rather than attested examples. Relying solely on corpus data from English and German that shows a wide range of syntactic and lexical variation independent of semantic compositionality, we argue that speakers’ use of idioms is in fact compatible with the rules governing freely composed language. This article is based on a talk given at the BSGL 2015 meeting on idioms in Brussels (Fellbaum 2015b).