Decomposability and the syntactic flexibility of Hebrew idioms
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.Idioms seem to be restricted in their syntactic flexibility (i.e., their ability to undergo syntactic operations, such as pronominalization, fronting, etc.) compared to literal phrases, but at the same time they also differ from one another along this metric. One of the most prominent accounts of this phenomenon is provided by Nunberg et al. (1994), who suggest that it is semantic decomposability, i.e. the ability to distribute the figurative meaning of idioms over their parts, which determines their syntactic flexibility. Nunberg et al. argue in favor of a fundamentally inflexible representation for non-decomposable idioms, but later work suggests that their inflexibility could be accounted for via general semantic restrictions imposed on their constituents by various syntactic operations. While idiom decomposability has been widely discussed in the literature and its relevance to idioms’ syntactic flexibility tested, its classification criteria and effect on flexibility remain unclear. To shed more light on this issue, we conducted three experiments on Hebrew idiomatic verb phrases, which to date had not been experimentally studied. The experiments address the methodological issues raised by previous studies in terms of both decomposability classification and experimental controls. Overall, our results do not support the claim that non-decomposable idioms are significantly less syntactically flexible than decomposable idioms, but only that they are generally less acceptable. The ways in which non-decomposable idioms may be able to circumvent supposed semantic restrictions imposed on their constituents are discussed, as are the implications of the results on different theories of idiom storage and representation.
Authors: Tom Dolev, Tal Siloni
Institution: Tel Aviv University
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $551
OpenAlex ID: W4416565816