On the Relevance of the Syntactic Flexibility of an Idiom for Its Recognition: Experimental Evidence from Polish

Abstract

The article is a contribution to a long-standing discussion on how idioms are represented and accessed in the mental lexicon. More specifically, in a timed cloze response study we investigate high and low syntactic flexibility idioms in Polish in order to find out whether the degree of syntactic flexibility influences the ease and time of idioms’ recognition. By doing so we contribute to the question of whether idioms are differently represented in the lexicon depending on their syntactic flexibility, as suggested by Nunberg et al. 1994 and Gibbs and Nayak 1989, or whether all idioms independent of their syntactic flexibility are represented lexically in the same hybrid way, as suggested by Cutting and Bock 1997 and Sprenger et al. 2006. The results of our study support the latter view.

The status of secondary imperfectivization in Polish: Evidence from VP idioms

“…According to (Harley 2014:269) interpretations of derivations even after the first categorizer can still be idiosyncratic. It has been demonstrated by Kędzierska et al (2018) that it is relatively easy to change the tense or add modal verbs and negation to Polish VP idioms without altering their figurative meaning because these modifications concern higher functional projections -external to vP. Given this, it is true that interpretations of derivations even after the first categorizer can be idiosyncratic as long as the elements added above the idiomatic part of the derivation do not interfere with VP internal semantics of the idiom (for instance tense and modal morphemes can be easily added to the VP idioms in Polish) but it does not necessarily mean that they are part of the idiomatic domain, they simply do not interfere with the semantics of idiomatic verbal phrases.…”

“…Horvath & Siloni 2019 for a different view). 1 It has been shown by Kędzierska et al (2018) for Polish that it is relatively easy to change the tense or add modal verbs and negation to VP idioms without altering their figurative meaning because these modifications concern higher functional projections -external to vP. On the other hand, it is very difficult to change the number of the NP object or modify it by using adjectival or relative clause modification because these modifications concern vP internal elements.…”