Idiom Syntax: Idiosyncratic or Principled?

An influential theory posits that the syntactic properties of idioms are idiosyncratic and encoded in the mental lexicon in “superlemmas”. It follows that experience with an idiom is necessary in order to judge the acceptability of syntactic operations on that idiom. To test these claims, Experiment 1 explored the acceptability of sentences containing familiar or invented idioms in four syntactic constructions. Unlike non-native speakers, who were better with familiar than invented idioms, Italian speakers performed equally well with the two types of expressions. In Experiment 2, native speakers, unlike non-native speakers, performed equally well in judging the acceptability of idiomatic sentences, regardless of whether these were familiar or unfamiliar to them. Experiment 3 indicated that acceptability of idiom syntactic variations is not fixed; rather it increases in pragmatically appropriate contexts. Experiment 4 showed that a general rule of Italian – bare nouns cannot occur in a preverbal position – applies systematically to idioms with such nouns, blocking their use in the passive form. The results, which failed to support the superlemma hypothesis, are interpreted in light of a new hypothesis, according to which the syntax of idioms is not idiosyncratic; rather it is governed by the same syntactic and pragmatic principles that apply to literal language.