This paper examines the extent to which verb diathesis alternations are empirically attested in corpus data. We automatically acquire alternating verbs from large balanced corpora by using partialparsing methods and taxonomic information, and discuss how corpus data can be used to quantify linguistic generalizations. We estimate the productivity of an alternation and the typicality of its membe...

Idiomatic expressions are plentiful in everyday language, yet they remain mysterious, as it is not clear exactly how people learn and understand them. They are of special interest to linguists, psycholinguists, and lexicographers, mainly because of their syntactic and semantic idiosyncrasies as well as their unclear lexical status. Despite a great deal of research on the properties of idioms in...