Words and Idioms

1. Idioms are constructions 1.1 Idioms in the Chomskyan paradigm Croft and Cruse (2004:225) describe the role of idioms in construction grammar as follows: “It is not an exaggeration to say that construction grammar grew out of a concern to find a place for idiomatic expressions in the speaker’s knowledge of a grammar of their language”. The reason for this focus on idioms in early constructionist research is that idioms are incompatible with a theory of language that assumes a strict separation of grammar and the lexicon, such as early versions of transformational-generative grammar (Chomsky 1965), the predominant linguistic framework in the 20 century. Chafe (1968) accordingly referred to idioms as an “anomaly in the Chomskyan paradigm”. One the one hand, idioms are not just fixed word combinations because they can be modified both lexically and syntactically. The idiom walk a tightrope (‘to act very carefully so that you avoid either of two equally bad but contrasting situations’) is an example in question. The following attestation from the Corpus of Contemporary American English illustrates that an adjective like legal can be inserted before the noun and that the syntactic arrangement of verb and object is not fixed either.