Sources of variability in the syntactic flexibility of idioms

Abstract

Idiomatic verb phrases (e.g., kick the bucket, fig. 'to die') vary in their syntactic flexibility: they can undergo operations like, e.g., passivization (“The bucket was kicked”) to varying degrees. We (re-)consider potential sources of this variability. It has been proposed that compositionality influences syntactic flexibility of idioms. In the first part of the paper, we reassess this finding from a methodological perspective by replicating earlier experiments on German and English, in which we change the previously used – and potentially biased – methods of measuring compositionality. Our results for German are compatible with the view that higher compositionality makes some of the tested structures more acceptable (most consistently: scrambling, prefield fronting, and which-questions), while we do not find a connection between compositionality and flexibility for English. In the second part of the paper, we present an additional experiment following up on the German findings. We extend the empirical domain and explore factors which – in contrast to compositionality – have the potential of explaining the syntactic flexibility of both idioms and non-idioms. We find that definiteness influences the flexibility of idioms and non-idioms in similar ways, supporting the view that both types of expressions are subject to the same grammatical rules. We discuss referentiality as a potential underlying semantic source for the behavior of both idioms and non-idioms.