ABSTRACT
Language involves choice from among many possibilities that are restricted only by whether they are good grammar or not. This is the position taken by most people who write on grammar. But making a choice at one point often commits one to further choices. Words are not independent of each other, certainly much less so than the proponents of grammatical choice would have one believe. The open choice principle must be complemented by the idiom principle, which means that ‘a language user has available to him or her a large number of semi-preconstructed phrases that constitute single choices, even though they might appear to be analyzable into segments’ (Sinclair 1991:110). The subject of this chapter is some of the types of such prefabricated language, called multi-word units or lexical phrases. They are well-established lexical combinations which consist of one or more word forms or lexemes (for these terms see 1.1) To indicate what is typical of the respective units, we will look at a variety of stylistic, situational, formal, semantic and syntactic aspects.
