The syntactic flexibility of German and English idioms: Evidence from acceptability rating experiments

It is controversial which idioms can occur with syntactic structures. For example, Mary kicked the bucket (figurative meaning: ‘Mary died’) be passivized to The was by ? We present a series of experiments in we test structures are compatible German (for there few experimental data so far) and English, using acceptability judgments. some tested – including left dislocation, scrambling, prefield fronting it particularly contested what extent they restricted semantic factors and, as consequence, idioms. In our data, these consistently showed similar limitations: were fully one subset (those categorized semantically compositional) degraded another non-compositional). Our findings only partly align previously proposed hierarchies respect their compatibility