Opening a Can of Worms: Idiom Flexibility, Decomposability, and the Mental Lexicon
Zachary K. Maher · 2013
Despite their prevalence in the English language, idiomatic expressions (e.g. kick the bucket, tip of the iceberg) have received only limited treatment in the linguistic literature. In this thesis, I ask the question of what speakers need to know in order to be competent users and comprehenders of idioms. I focus particularly on idioms ’ variant flexibility (e.g. Some strings were pulled by the politician vs. #The bucket was kicked by the man). Many different frameworks have been proposed over small sets of idealized data, resulting in conclusions that do not truly capture the behavior of idioms. I present the first study to look at a group of syntactically diverse idioms, gathering acceptability judgments for each idiom presented separately with 3-4 modifications (adjective insertion, two types of word substitution, passivization). Results indicate that previous knowledge of an idiom does not affect the reliability with which participants deem a modification acceptable, suggesting that idiom syntactic flexibility is not encoded idiosyncratically in the lexicon. Additionally, idiom flexibility is not a single spectrum; an idiom can accept adjective insertion but not word substitution or vice versa, as observed through regression analysis of the judgment data. Finally, the presence of a large set of judgment data allows us to begin to propose new principles to explain idiom flexibility. A follow-up study addresses a confound in Gibbs & Nayak’s (1989) Idiom Decomposability Hypothesis,