How flexible are idioms? A corpus-based study

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Linguistics 2019-07, Vol.57 (4), p.735-767
Main Author: Fellbaum, Christiane
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Compositionality
corpus data
Corpus linguistics
English language
flexibility
German language
Idioms
Lexical semantics
Psycholinguistics
Semantics
Syntax
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Summary: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.
ISSN:0024-3949
1613-396X
DOI:10.1515/ling-2019-0015