ABSTRACT

Idioms are usually defined by their property of semantic eccentricity; they are meaningful strings whose meaning is not a direct function of the meanings of their components. In linguistics and psycholinguistics, the main problem posed by idioms is the necessity (in grammatical analysis and comprehension) of treat­ ing the string as a unit rather than decomposing it into its parts. The syntactic behavior of idioms has been important to this problem principally because of variability among idioms in the extent to which they maintain their idiomaticity under syntactic transformation.