BETWEEN LEXICON AND GRAMMAR: ON THE SYNTAX OF IDIOMS

Abstract

The focus of the present study is a category that characterizes some types of phraseological units — the semantic analyzability of idioms. Syntactic variability of an idiom depends on how semantically independent parts of this idiom are. Thus, the semantic autonomy of the constituents of an idiom determines (along with other factors) its syntactic behavior. The greater the semantic independence of the individual constituents of the idiom, the greater the potential for its syntactic variation. Conversely, the stronger the semantic cohesion of the constituents of the idiom, the more it resists various modifications. Semantic analyzability of idioms is significant both from a practical and theoretical point of view. On the one hand, semantic analyzability helps to determine the limits of the variability of idioms, which is essential for solving a number of practical problems — first of all, for marking idioms in the corpus. On the other hand, semantic analyzability is a factor determining the place of a given unit on the lexicon-grammar axis. Linguistic phenomena located between lexicon and grammar are of increasing interest to linguists today. Usually phraseology as a whole — and in particular idioms as its central class — is considered to be belonging to the scope of the lexicon. The main distinguishing feature of idioms, which, although they generally obey the same grammatical rules as free phrases, is a single lexical meaning. Nevertheless, idioms are heterogeneous with respect to their position on the lexicon-grammar axis: non-analyzable idioms are closer to the lexical pole than analyzable ones. Refs 33.