ABSTRACT
Idioms have been the subject of investigation by linguists and psychologists for a number of years. Both groups have been concerned largely with the representa tion and status of idioms in the lexicon, that is, with the question as to whether idioms are stored, accessed, and subject to grammatical rules in the same way as single lexical items. Whereas the experiments of psychologists by and large have investigated how speakers process nonliteral language, linguists generally have tried to determine the status of idioms in the lexicon by comparing their syntactic behavior with that of single-word lexical items. The central question is whether or not idioms can be shown to have a meaningful internal structure, that is, whether or not they are decomposable into individual chunks or constituents that are semantically non vacuous (Nunberg, 1978; Pulman, 1986; Wasow, Sag, & Nunberg, 1983; and many others).
