Idiomatic Expressions and Grammatical Constructions

A thorough investigation into idioms and their grand meaning, including how best to analyze them.

Any theory of idioms should be part and parcel of a general theory of grammar, adding as little machinery to one’s overall grammatical approach as possible in describing both the syntactic and semantic idiosyncrasies and regularities of this large class of linguistic expressions. This volume presents several lexicalist analyses of idioms within the framework of Sign-Based Construction Grammar, reflecting three guiding principles: many but not all idioms are syntactically and semantically compositional, dividing into distinct classes; idioms are analyzable in terms of a suitably rich lexicon and a set of constructions (lexical and syntactic rules) with corresponding meaning representations; and idiomaticity is a gradient phenomenon, exhibiting wide variation in degree of syntactic flexibility and meaning.

Paul Kay is Professor of Linguistics, Emeritus, University of California at Berkley and Senior Research Scientist at International Computer Science Institute at Berkley. Laura A. Michaelis is Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Colorado at Boulder. Ivan Sag (1949–2013) was a professor of linguistics at Stanford University. Dan Flickinger was a senior researcher at CSLI Stanford

Preface vii
1.A Lexical Theory of Phrasal Idioms 1

1.1 Introduction 1
1.2 The Analysis of Syntactically Flexible Expressions 6
1.3 The Analysis of Semi-Fixed Expressions 13
1.4 Super-Flexible Idioms 21
1.5 Locality and Idiomaticity 41
1.6 Locality 56
1.7 Idiom Words Governed by Non-Idiom Predicators 62
1.8 Conclusion 64

2 Partial Inversion in English 68
2.1 Uniformity and diversity in the split subject family of constructions: the basic data 73
2.2 Sign-Based Construction Grammar 93
2.3 Agreement 96
2.4 The Split Subject Construction 101
2.5 Oblique Inversion (OI) 107
2.6 Presentational there 136
2.7 Deictic Inversion 138
2.8 Existential There 145
2.9 Reversed Specficational be (RS-be) 156
2.10 Conclusion 159

3164
3.1 Expletives 168
3.2 Analysis of Copy Raising 172
3.3 Conclusion 178

References 180
Name Index 190
Subject Index 193

March 2025

Idiomatic Expressions and Grammatical Constructions

Contents