Phonological similarity in multi-word units Phonological similarity in multi-word units

In this paper, I investigate the phonological similarity of different elements of the phonological pole of multi-word units. I discuss two case studies on slightly different levels of abstractness. The first case study investigates lexically fully-specified V-NP idioms such as kick the bucket and lose one's cool; the idioms investigated are taken from the Collins Cobuild Dictionary of Idioms (2002). The second case study investigates the lexically rather unspecified wayconstruction exemplified by He fought his way through the crowd (cf. Goldberg 1995: Ch. 9) on the basis of data from the British National Corpus 1.0. I show that both patterns exhibit a strong phonological within-pole relation, namely a strong preference for having their slots filled with phonologically similar elements where phonological similarity is manifested in strong alliteration patterns. These preferences are statistically significant when compared to chance level expectations derived both from the corpora and from the CELEX database (Baayen et al. 1995).