Verbal multiword expressions: Idiomaticity and flexibility — TEI-tagged view

Livnat Herzig Sheinfux, Tali Arad Greshler, Nurit Melnik, Shuly Wintner · 2019 · linguistics · doi:10.5281/zenodo.2579035 · full text at the source · TEI xml · tagged edition · index · concepts · authors
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Other fields define these differently the same word, defined another way in another discipline
transparency 5 fields · false positives 4 fields
Tags on this paper every tag the record carries, whether or not the words occur in the text below — a number is how many papers in the corpus carry that tag; a tag with no number is unique to this paper
multiword expression idiom decomposability transparency7 corpus6 multiword expressions verbal idioms paraphrasability figuration cranberry idioms transformational deficiency semantic idiomaticity stringent selectional restrictions canonical form flexibility4 continuum with idioms exhibiting varying degrees of flexibility categorically classified as either flexible or rigid transparent figurative idioms opaque figurative idioms opaque non-figurative idioms transformations2 syntactic variations argument structure variations lexical insertions lexical substitutions heTenTen 2014 Corpus Query Language morphological features of words logical operators cast a wide net false positives7 manual inspection of each result occurrence of all types of variation non-canonical instances ascribe to these meaningless words content interaction between the two dimensions corpus-analysis16
Method, as described: corpus study

Our tag layer for this paper

Cross-disciplinary analysis
content-tags & facets: phenomenon · claim-type · cross-domain-transfer · mechanism · claim-relation · replication-status · limitation — grounded in the full text
phenomenonidiom flexibility is a continuum rather than a two-way split, with every idiom examined showing some flexibility— “we hypothesize that idioms cannot be categorically classified as either flexible or rigid. Rather, we envision a continuum with idioms exhibiting varying degrees of flexibility, possibly dependent on their semantic properties.”
claim-typecritique— “we argue that decomposability is not a primitive semantic property of idioms, nor can it be used to predict idioms' behavior.”
method — evidence— “We used heTenTen 2014 (Baroni et al. 2009), a billion-token web-crawled Hebrew corpus, available on SketchEngine (Kilgarriff et al. 2004), to search for different types of variations that occur with representative MWEs from the three semantic classes we outlined in Section 3.1. We focused on fifteen specific verbal MWEs, and annotated 400…
object of study — evidence— “In this chapter we focus on verbal MWEs, often referred to as "verbal idioms" or simply "idioms".”
research question — evidence— “Our primary research question is whether the behavior of idioms is an idiosyncratic property of each idiom or a consequence of more general constraints.”
contribution — evidence— “In this chapter we consider an alternative categorization of idioms. More precisely, we cross-classify idioms according to two dimensions: figuration and transparency”
mechanismthe idiom whose common characterization is rigidity is searched for in a twenty-billion-word corpus, chosen because the earlier corpora were too small to distinguish an idiom that cannot vary from one that is simply too rare for its variants to appear— “In order to verify that the idiom's common characterization as a rigid idiom is not an epiphenomenon of its low frequency, we consulted a much larger corpus: enTenTen13 (Baroni et al. 2009), a 20 billion word English corpus, available on SketchEngine (Kilgarriff et al. 2004).”mechanisms[0]
mechanismidioms are cross-classified on two dimensions at once - figuration, whether a literal meaning can be pictured, and transparency, whether the route from that picture to the idiomatic meaning can be recovered - in place of the single decomposable/non-decomposable cut— “In this chapter we consider an alternative categorization of idioms. More precisely, we cross-classify idioms according to two dimensions: figuration and transparency. Figuration reflects the degree to which the idiom can be assigned a literal meaning. Transparency (or opacity) relates to how easy it is to recover the motivation for an…mechanisms[1]
mechanismqueries are written in a corpus query language over morphological features - part of speech, lemma, clitic - combined with logical operators, which the authors call particularly important for casting a wide net over non-canonical word orders, discontinuous elements and morphological inflections— “SketchEngines's Corpus Query Language (CQL) provides a way of defining complex queries which target morphological features of words (e.g., POS, lemmas, clitics) and which make use of logical operators (and/or/not). These features are particularly important when our goal is to cast a wide net to retrieve variations in general, and in…mechanisms[2]
mechanisma query wide enough to catch variants also returns results that are not instances of the idiom, so each result is inspected by hand to remove the false positives— “Nevertheless, a wide net comes at a cost; not all the retrieved results are necessarily instances of the idiom. Often, only a manual inspection of each result can weed out the false positives.”mechanisms[3]
mechanismthe endpoint is switched from frequency to existence: rather than how often each variation occurs, the study verifies that every type of variation occurs at least once for each idiom— “For this reason we do not present quantitative data with regard to the distribution of the canonical idiom and its variations. We did, however, verify the occurrence of all types of variation for each idiom.”mechanisms[4]
mechanismargument-structure variation is observable in Hebrew because it is carried by combining one consonantal root with different morphological templates— “Hebrew presents an interesting case in this respect, since argument structure variations are associated with the combination of one consonantal root with different morphological templates (Doron 2008; 2003).”mechanisms[5]
mechanismthe modifier question is split in two: modifications of all types count as variations, while it is the modifier's semantic SCOPE that can provide evidence about whether idiom parts are assigned individual idiomatic meanings— “The question of whether a modifier is internal or external relates to the issue of decomposability, but not to the question of flexibility. When idiom parts are syntactically modified in an idiom this is certainly an instance of variation; the idiom does not appear in its canonical form. Thus, modifications of all types are variations. The…mechanisms[6]
critiques Nunberg et al. (1994)— “We challenge Nunberg et al.'s (1994) proposal, attributing decomposability as the determining factor regarding idioms' flexibility/rigidity, first due to the fuzziness of the notion of decomposability, and second, in light of empirical investigations in English and in other languages that revealed flexibility within idioms…claim_relations[0]
critiques Nunberg et al. (1994)— “The dimension which Nunberg et al. (1994: 498) assume plays a crucial role in determining the behavior of an idiom is its decomposability. Nevertheless, as was previously mentioned, determining whether an idiom is decomposable or not is rather impressionistic, and is prone to circularity, where its flexibility is taken as evidence for its…claim_relations[1]
critiques Nunberg et al. (1994)— “In this chapter we challenge the validity of the hypothesized correlation between decomposability and flexibility. As previously mentioned, decomposability is a fuzzy notion which is difficult to apply when classifying idioms. Although it 40 2 Verbal multiword expressions: Idiomaticity and flexibility was proposed by Nunberg et al. (1994) to…claim_relations[2]
qualifies Riehemann (2001)— “Riehemann classified the idioms as decomposable or non-decomposable by attempting to match them with a similarly structured paraphrase. She classified those for which she found an appropriate paraphrase as decomposable. Nevertheless, she observed that the boundary between the two categories is fuzzy. This notwithstanding, her findings show a…claim_relations[3]
qualifies Riehemann (2001)— “Riehemann classified the idioms as decomposable or non-decomposable by attempting to match them with a similarly structured paraphrase. She classified those for which she found an appropriate paraphrase as decomposable. Nevertheless, she observed that the boundary between the two categories is fuzzy. This notwithstanding, her findings show a…claim_relations[4]
qualifies Riehemann (2001)— “Riehemann classified the idioms as decomposable or non-decomposable by attempting to match them with a similarly structured paraphrase. She classified those for which she found an appropriate paraphrase as decomposable. Nevertheless, she observed that the boundary between the two categories is fuzzy. This notwithstanding, her findings show a…claim_relations[5]
sensedecomposability - Nunberg et al.'s sense: an idiom whose meaning, once known, can be distributed among its parts— “The former are idioms whose meaning, once known, can be distributed among their parts. A typical example is spill the beans, where spill roughly means `reveal' and beans roughly means `secrets'.”senses[0]
sensetransparency - the relation between an idiom's literal and idiomatic meaning, which the source proposal explicitly warns must not be confused with decomposability— “They do however explicitly warn against confusing decomposability with transparency, which they define as the relation between the literal and idiomatic meaning.”senses[1]
senseparaphrasability - whether the idiom can be paraphrased by a similarly structured phrase, explicitly distinguished from decomposability— “An additional distinction is made between decomposability and paraphrasability. The fact that the meaning of an idiom can be paraphrased using a phrase of a similar argument structure does not necessarily indicate that it is decomposable.”senses[2]
senseflexibility - the categorical sense inherited from Nunberg et al., on which an idiom is either transformationally productive or transformationally deficient— “They propose that the semantic distinction between decomposable and non-decomposable idioms accounts for the difference between "transformationally productive" and "transformationally deficient" idioms.”senses[3]
senseflexibility - this paper's sense: a continuum, with idioms exhibiting varying degrees rather than falling into two classes— “Rather, we envision a continuum with idioms exhibiting varying degrees of flexibility, possibly dependent on their semantic properties.”senses[4]
sensefiguration - the degree to which the idiom can be assigned a literal meaning that conjures a picture— “Figuration reflects the degree to which the idiom can be assigned a literal meaning. Transparency (or opacity) relates to how easy it is to recover the motivation for an idiom's use, or, in other words, to explain the relationship between its literal meaning and its idiomatic one.”senses[5]
senseSemantic idiomaticity - MWE meaning not systematically derivable from independently used parts— “The most prominent type of idiosyncrasy ascribed to MWEs is their semantic idiomaticity; their meaning cannot be systematically derived from the meanings that their parts have when they are used independently”senses[6]
senseCanonical form - the unvaried idiom form contrasted with meaning-preserving transformationssenses[7]
senseIdiom flexibility - a continuum of degrees rather than a flexible/rigid binarysenses[8]
senseFiguration - availability of a comprehensible literal picture
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senses[9]
senseTransparency / opacity - recoverability of the motivation connecting literal and idiomatic meanings
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senses[10]
senseSyntactic variation - altered configuration with lexical material and grammatical functions preserved
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senses[11]
senseArgument-structure variation - remapping arguments or changing valence
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senses[12]
senseLexical insertion - non-selected material added inside an idiom
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senses[13]
senseLexical substitution - an idiom component replaced while idiomatic meaning remains
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senses[14]
senseWide-net corpus search - high recall for noncanonical idioms at the cost of false positives
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senses[15]
senseOccurrence endpoint - verify each variation type at least once rather than estimate its distribution
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senses[16]
senseTransparency-figuration interaction - neither dimension alone accounts for idiom behavior
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senses[17]
controlthe rigidity claim was re-checked against a much larger corpus, enTenTen13 — held — rules out that the idiom looks rigid only because it is RARE - that its apparent fixedness is an artefact of low frequency in a small corpus
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controls[0]
differs inNunberg et al. (1994) — WHICH PROPERTY DETERMINES FLEXIBILITY, AND THE CHALLENGE IS MOUNTED ON TWO SEPARATE GROUNDS THE PAPER NUMBERS ITSELF: 'first due to the fuzziness of the notion of decomposability, and second, in light of empirical investigations in English and in other languages that revealed flexibility within idioms previously classified as non-decomposable.' One ground is about the criterion being unusable, the other about it being wrong where it is usable - and the replacement offered is a pair of graded dimensions, transparency and figuration, rather than a sharper version of the same binary
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Quotation withheld — this paper is not ours to reproduce, and the page has already quoted as much of it as the rights layer allows. The tag, its field and its confidence stand; the sentence is at the publisher.
claim_relations[0]
differs inNunberg et al. (1994) — WHETHER THE CRITERION CAN BE APPLIED INDEPENDENTLY OF WHAT IT PREDICTS. 'determining whether an idiom is decomposable or not is rather impressionistic, and is prone to circularity, where its flexibility is taken as evidence for its decomposability' - so the property that is supposed to PREDICT flexibility is in practice read OFF flexibility
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claim_relations[1]
differs inNunberg et al. (1994) — WHICH WAY THE IMPLICATION RUNS. Decomposability was proposed as 'the semantic property of idioms which PREDICTS their behavior', but 'at times this hypothesis is turned around and idiom flexibility is used as a defining property of non-decomposable idioms' - the predictor becomes the definition, at which point the hypothesis cannot fail
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Quotation withheld — this paper is not ours to reproduce, and the page has already quoted as much of it as the rights layer allows. The tag, its field and its confidence stand; the sentence is at the publisher.
claim_relations[2]
evidence status noteNunberg et al. (1994) — 2026-08-16: A RUNNING HEAD IS SPLICED INTO THE MIDDLE OF THIS QUOTE. The staged extraction of this book chapter interleaves its page furniture - '40 2 Verbal multiword…' - into the body text, and this span crosses one occurrence. The quote is an exact substring of the staged file and is NOT a sentence of the paper: the words on either side of the head were never continuous. Read the span with the head deleted. Detected by an internal tool, which finds furniture by repetition rather than by shape; the two shape-based finders all-caps, caption) see neither of this chapter's 35 insertions. THE HYPOTHESIS IN THE DIFFERS-IN QUOTE IS NUNBERG ET AL.'S - the sentence before that quote says it 'was proposed by Nunberg et al. (1994)', with the page's running head spliced into that sentence.
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claim_relations[2]
differs inRiehemann (2001) — WHETHER A FUZZY BOUNDARY BLOCKS A CLEAR RESULT. Riehemann classified idioms by whether a similarly structured paraphrase could be found, 'Nevertheless, she observed that the boundary between the two categories is fuzzy. This notwithstanding, her findings show a clear distinction' - canonical forms accounting for about 75% of occurrences of decomposable idioms against 97% of non-decomposable ones. A classification its own author calls fuzzy still separates the data
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Quotation withheld — this paper is not ours to reproduce, and the page has already quoted as much of it as the rights layer allows. The tag, its field and its confidence stand; the sentence is at the publisher.
claim_relations[3]
evidence status noteRiehemann (2001) — 2026-08-16: A RUNNING HEAD IS SPLICED INTO THE MIDDLE OF THIS QUOTE. The staged extraction of this book chapter interleaves its page furniture - '39 Livnat Herzig Sheinfux, Tali Arad Greshler, Nurit Melnik…' - into the body text, and this span crosses one occurrence. The quote is an exact substring of the staged file and is NOT a sentence of the paper: the words on either side of the head were never continuous. Read the span with the head deleted. Detected by an internal tool, which finds furniture by repetition rather than by shape; the two shape-based finders all-caps, caption) see neither of this chapter's 35 insertions.
Quotation withheld — this paper is not ours to reproduce, and the page has already quoted as much of it as the rights layer allows. The tag, its field and its confidence stand; the sentence is at the publisher.
claim_relations[3]
differs inRiehemann (2001) — WHETHER A FUZZY BOUNDARY BLOCKS A CLEAR RESULT. Riehemann classified idioms by whether a similarly structured paraphrase could be found, 'Nevertheless, she observed that the boundary between the two categories is fuzzy. This notwithstanding, her findings show a clear distinction' - canonical forms accounting for about 75% of occurrences of decomposable idioms against 97% of non-decomposable ones. A classification its own author calls fuzzy still separates the data
Quotation withheld — this paper is not ours to reproduce, and the page has already quoted as much of it as the rights layer allows. The tag, its field and its confidence stand; the sentence is at the publisher.
Quotation withheld — this paper is not ours to reproduce, and the page has already quoted as much of it as the rights layer allows. The tag, its field and its confidence stand; the sentence is at the publisher.
claim_relations[4]
evidence status noteRiehemann (2001) — PAGE FURNITURE IS SPLICED INTO THE 'evidence' QUOTE - a page number and the chapter's author running head: '39 Livnat Herzig Sheinfux, Tali Arad Greshler, Nurit Melnik…'. The words on either side of it were never continuous on the page; read the quote with it deleted.
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claim_relations[4]
evidence status noteRiehemann (2001) — 2026-08-16: A RUNNING HEAD IS SPLICED INTO THE MIDDLE OF THIS QUOTE. The staged extraction of this book chapter interleaves its page furniture - '39 Livnat Herzig Sheinfux, Tali Arad Greshler, Nurit Melnik…' - into the body text, and this span crosses one occurrence. The quote is an exact substring of the staged file and is NOT a sentence of the paper: the words on either side of the head were never continuous. Read the span with the head deleted. Detected by an internal tool, which finds furniture by repetition rather than by shape; the two shape-based finders all-caps, caption) see neither of this chapter's 35 insertions.
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claim_relations[5]
edgedecomposability —distinct-from→ transparency
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concept_edges[0]
edgedecomposability —distinct-from→ paraphrasability
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concept_edges[1]
edgefiguration —distinct-from→ transparency
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concept_edges[3]
relationsyntactic variations —is-a→ transformations — We distinguish between four types of transformations: syntactic variations, argument structure variations, lexical insertions and lexical substitutions. 3.2.1 Syntactic variations
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concept_edges[5]
relationargument structure variations —is-a→ transformations — We distinguish between four types of transformations: syntactic variations, argument structure variations, lexical insertions and lexical substitutions. 3.2.1 Syntactic variations
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concept_edges[6]
relationlexical insertions —is-a→ transformations — We distinguish between four types of transformations: syntactic variations, argument structure variations, lexical insertions and lexical substitutions. 3.2.1 Syntactic variations
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concept_edges[7]
relationlexical substitutions —is-a→ transformations — We distinguish between four types of transformations: syntactic variations, argument structure variations, lexical insertions and lexical substitutions. 3.2.1 Syntactic variations
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concept_edges[8]
auditcontinuum with idioms exhibiting varying degrees of flexibility —distinct-from→ categorically classified as either flexible or rigid — Audit 2026-09-28: DOUBTFUL - read against its full span and kept, but the span says 'we hypothesize' and 'we envision' the continuum; hedged.
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concept_edges[9]
outcome (stated by the tagger, no quotation)control — heldcontrols[0]
for which uselimitation — any rate or distribution of canonical versus variant forms from this study: the authors state they do not present quantitative data, and why
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limitations[0]
for which uselimitation — cross-linguistic or general claims about idiom flexibility: the authors bound the generalisation to a limited set of Hebrew verbal idioms
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limitations[1]
for which uselimitation — decomposability as an independent predictor of flexibility: the paper states the diagnosis is prone to circularity with the behaviour it predicts
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limitations[2]
for which uselimitation — the decomposable/non-decomposable split as an operationalised classification: no definitions or decision procedure were given with it
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limitations[3]
for which uselimitation — the decomposable/non-decomposable assignment as sharp: the study that applied it reports the boundary as fuzzy
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limitations[4]
evidence status notelimitation — 2026-08-16: A RUNNING HEAD IS SPLICED INTO THE MIDDLE OF THIS QUOTE. The staged extraction of this book chapter interleaves its page furniture - '38 2 Verbal multiword expressions: Idiomaticity…' - into the body text, and this span crosses one occurrence. The quote is an exact substring of the staged file and is NOT a sentence of the paper: the words on either side of the head were never continuous. Read the span with the head deleted. Detected by an internal tool, which finds furniture by repetition rather than by shape; the two shape-based finders all-caps, caption) see neither of this chapter's 35 insertions.
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limitations[5]
for which uselimitation — speaker agreement as established for decomposability: one study found 75% agreement on most items, another classified only 40% of 171 idioms at that threshold
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limitations[5]
for which uselimitation — the canonical rigidity of kick the bucket: variation is attestable only in very large corpora, so earlier rigid classifications may reflect corpus size
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limitations[6]
for which uselimitation — the transparency/figuration hypothesis as confirmed throughout: the cranberry class behaved opposite to the authors' stated expectation
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limitations[7]
for which uselimitation — transparency or figuration singly as a predictor of flexibility: the paper states neither alone accounts for the behaviour
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limitations[8]
weightascribe to these meaningless words content → flexibility — 0.9
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unhoused_relations[0]
weightinteraction between the two dimensions → behavior of idioms — 0.9
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unhoused_relations[7]
no type for thisascribe to these meaningless words content → flexibility — Speakers' semantic enrichment of meaningless cranberry words makes the idioms more flexible; the paper's 'consequently' cue is not governed by the causes gate, so this claim remains unhoused.
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unhoused_relations[0]
no type for thiscranberry idioms → idiom — Cranberry idioms are one of the three idiom categories; taxonomic-member is absent from the edge registry and the gate does not accept the paper's category cue as is-a.
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unhoused_relations[1]
no type for thisCorpus Query Language → morphological features of words — CQL targets morphological word features; operates-on is absent from the edge registry.
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unhoused_relations[2]
no type for thisCorpus Query Language → logical operators — CQL uses logical operators; implemented-with is absent from the edge registry.
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unhoused_relations[3]
no type for thiscast a wide net → false positives — Wide-net retrieval returns non-idiom false positives; retrieval-tradeoff is absent from the edge registry.
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unhoused_relations[4]
no type for thismanual inspection of each result → false positives — Manual inspection weeds out false positives; removes is absent from the edge registry.
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unhoused_relations[5]
no type for thisvery large corpora → non-canonical instances — Very large corpora are required to attest rare noncanonical idiom forms; prerequisite-for is absent from the edge registry.
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unhoused_relations[6]
no type for thisinteraction between the two dimensions → behavior of idioms — The interaction between transparency and figuration accounts for idiom behavior; accounts-for is absent from the edge registry.
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unhoused_relations[7]
limitationThe study reports no quantitative distribution, because the wide-net queries return false positives that only manual inspection can remove.
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limitations[0]
limitationThe generalisation rests on a limited set of Hebrew verbal idioms.
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limitations[1]
limitationThe criterion under critique is described as impressionistic and circular: flexibility is taken as evidence for the very property meant to predict it.
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limitations[2]
limitationThe originating proposal supplied neither precise definitions of its two categories nor a procedure for telling them apart.
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limitations[3]
limitationAn independent corpus study classifying by paraphrase reported the boundary between the two categories as fuzzy.
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limitations[4]
limitationTwo psycholinguistic studies of the same construct disagree on whether speakers can apply it reliably.
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limitations[5]
limitationThe rigidity of the field's standard example is shown to depend on corpus size; variation appears only in a very large corpus.
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limitations[6]
limitationThe authors' own prediction about cranberry idioms was not borne out, and they say so.
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limitations[7]
limitationNeither proposed dimension accounts for idiom behaviour on its own; the paper attributes the effect to an interaction.
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limitations[8]
Content tags
content-observations: finding · quantity · variable · definition · key-term — grounded in the full text
findingThe paper's central question is whether idiom behaviour is idiosyncratic or predictable from general constraints.
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content_tags.findings[0]
findingAn alternative classification of idioms is proposed, built on transparency and figuration.
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content_tags.findings[1]
evidence status notefinding — QUOTE RECOVERED FROM THE PAPER'S OWN CHARACTERS. The recorded quote was LETTERS-ONLY IDENTICAL to this stretch of the staged text but not an exact substring of it - spaces, hyphens, ligature glyphs or mathematical operators differed, so it could never anchor. This is the file's own text between the same two letters: not produced by a rule about the damage, copied out of the file. Round-trip checked (the recovered span is letters-only equal to the original) and length-checked. The text as originally recorded is kept in evidence as extracted.content_tags.findings[1]
findingEVIDENCE CORRECTED (RE-GROUNDED) · The hypothesis is directional and therefore testable: more transparent and more figurative idioms should bend more.
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content_tags.findings[2]
retractedfinding — RE-GROUNDED. The published string was in NEITHER copy of the paper. and the difference is TYPOGRAPHY, not wording: ours carried a line-break hyphen ('an id- iom') and curly quotation marks where the staged body has straight ones. The hyphen is closed by the reader's own check; the quote marks are not, and either alone makes a correct quote unverifiable. The paper states this hypothesis TWICE, verbatim, so the span was extended backwards to the sentence that makes the abstract's occurrence unique.content_tags.findings[2]
findingIdioms are not uniformly rigid; some keep their idiomatic meaning outside their canonical form.
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content_tags.findings[3]
variabletransparency (independent)
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content_tags.variables[1]
variablefiguration (independent)
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content_tags.variables[2]
definitionsemantic idiomaticity
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content_tags.definitions[0]
key-termsmultiword expression, idiom, flexibility, transparency, figuration, decomposability, Modern Hebrew
Concepts
terms this paper carries, each with the sentence it was cut from — the layer that joins one paper to another. Terms with no quote yet are on CONCEPTS.html.
conceptdecomposability
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concepts[2]
concepttransparency
Quotation withheld — this paper is not ours to reproduce, and the page has already quoted as much of it as the rights layer allows. The tag, its field and its confidence stand; the sentence is at the publisher.
concepts[3]
conceptmultiword expressions
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concepts[5]
conceptverbal idioms
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concepts[6]
conceptparaphrasability
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concepts[7]
conceptfiguration
Quotation withheld — this paper is not ours to reproduce, and the page has already quoted as much of it as the rights layer allows. The tag, its field and its confidence stand; the sentence is at the publisher.
concepts[8]
conceptcranberry idioms
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concepts[9]
concepttransformational deficiency
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concepts[10]
conceptsemantic idiomaticity — not defined in this paper's own words; meaning that cannot be systematically derived from independently used component meanings
Quotation withheld — this paper is not ours to reproduce, and the page has already quoted as much of it as the rights layer allows. The tag, its field and its confidence stand; the sentence is at the publisher.
concepts[11]
conceptstringent selectional restrictions — not defined in this paper's own words; lexical-component constraints characteristic of verbal idioms
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concepts[12]
conceptcanonical form — not defined in this paper's own words; untransformed surface form against which idiom flexibility is assessed
Quotation withheld — this paper is not ours to reproduce, and the page has already quoted as much of it as the rights layer allows. The tag, its field and its confidence stand; the sentence is at the publisher.
concepts[13]
conceptflexibility — not defined in this paper's own words; capacity of an idiom to retain its meaning under noncanonical forms
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concepts[14]
conceptcontinuum with idioms exhibiting varying degrees of flexibility — not defined in this paper's own words; graded alternative to classifying each idiom as wholly flexible or rigid
Quotation withheld — this paper is not ours to reproduce, and the page has already quoted as much of it as the rights layer allows. The tag, its field and its confidence stand; the sentence is at the publisher.
concepts[15]
conceptcategorically classified as either flexible or rigid — not defined in this paper's own words; all-or-nothing classification rejected by the authors
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concepts[16]
concepttransparent figurative idioms — not defined in this paper's own words; figurative idioms whose literal picture motivates their idiomatic meaning
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concepts[17]
conceptopaque figurative idioms — not defined in this paper's own words; figurative idioms whose literal picture is not perceptibly related to their idiomatic meaning
Quotation withheld — this paper is not ours to reproduce, and the page has already quoted as much of it as the rights layer allows. The tag, its field and its confidence stand; the sentence is at the publisher.
concepts[18]
conceptopaque non-figurative idioms — not defined in this paper's own words; opaque idioms lacking a comprehensible literal picture, including cranberry idioms
Quotation withheld — this paper is not ours to reproduce, and the page has already quoted as much of it as the rights layer allows. The tag, its field and its confidence stand; the sentence is at the publisher.
concepts[19]
concepttransformations — not defined in this paper's own words; formal changes through which verbal-idiom flexibility is observed
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concepts[20]
conceptsyntactic variations — not defined in this paper's own words; configuration changes that preserve lexical material and grammatical functions
Quotation withheld — this paper is not ours to reproduce, and the page has already quoted as much of it as the rights layer allows. The tag, its field and its confidence stand; the sentence is at the publisher.
concepts[21]
conceptargument structure variations — not defined in this paper's own words; changes in argument-to-function mapping or valence
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concepts[22]
conceptlexical insertions — not defined in this paper's own words; non-selected lexical material inserted within an idiom
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concepts[23]
conceptlexical substitutions — not defined in this paper's own words; replacement of an idiom's lexical components while retaining idiomatic meaning
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concepts[24]
conceptheTenTen 2014 — not defined in this paper's own words; billion-token web-crawled Hebrew corpus used in the empirical study
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concepts[25]
conceptCorpus Query Language — not defined in this paper's own words; SketchEngine query language used to retrieve morphologically varied idiom forms
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concepts[26]
conceptmorphological features of words — not defined in this paper's own words; part-of-speech, lemma, and clitic attributes targeted by CQL
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concepts[27]
conceptlogical operators — not defined in this paper's own words; and/or/not operations used to combine corpus-query constraints
Quotation withheld — this paper is not ours to reproduce, and the page has already quoted as much of it as the rights layer allows. The tag, its field and its confidence stand; the sentence is at the publisher.
concepts[28]
conceptcast a wide net — not defined in this paper's own words; high-recall querying for noncanonical orders, discontinuity, and inflection
Quotation withheld — this paper is not ours to reproduce, and the page has already quoted as much of it as the rights layer allows. The tag, its field and its confidence stand; the sentence is at the publisher.
concepts[29]
conceptfalse positives — not defined in this paper's own words; retrieved results that are not instances of the target idiom
Quotation withheld — this paper is not ours to reproduce, and the page has already quoted as much of it as the rights layer allows. The tag, its field and its confidence stand; the sentence is at the publisher.
concepts[30]
conceptmanual inspection of each result — not defined in this paper's own words; human review used to remove non-idiom retrievals
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concepts[31]
conceptoccurrence of all types of variation — not defined in this paper's own words; presence-only endpoint used instead of estimating variation frequencies
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concepts[32]
conceptnon-canonical instances — not defined in this paper's own words; rare transformed instances detectable only in sufficiently large corpora
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concepts[33]
conceptascribe to these meaningless words content — not defined in this paper's own words; interpretation imposed on otherwise meaningless cranberry words
Quotation withheld — this paper is not ours to reproduce, and the page has already quoted as much of it as the rights layer allows. The tag, its field and its confidence stand; the sentence is at the publisher.
concepts[34]
conceptinteraction between the two dimensions — not defined in this paper's own words; joint account in which the effect of each semantic dimension depends on the other
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concepts[35]

When we have changed our mind. Some entries in the table begin with a word in capitals and the reason for it. EVIDENCE CORRECTED — the finding still stands, but we had quoted the wrong sentence from the paper, and the quotation has been replaced with the right one. RETRACTED — the entry itself was wrong; it stays on the page, marked, with the reason, rather than being deleted. WITHDRAWN AND REPLACED — the entry was wrong, and a corrected version of it appears in the entries below. Each mark carries its own reason, in brackets, because the reasons differ from one entry to the next. An entry we have WITHDRAWN is removed from this page and kept in the record, with its reason. A line reading Audit and a date is a later re-reading of the entry against its whole sentence: DOUBTFUL means it was kept, and the reason says what is loose about it. Quotation marks inside the tagger's sentence. Where a tag is the tagger's own sentence, a phrase in quotation marks inside it is borrowed from the paper — the tagger's wording around it is not. The paper's own sentence is the evidence quote for that row; on this page it is withheld with the article, and the article is at its publisher. Nothing inside quotation marks anywhere on this page is ours: if it is quoted, it is the paper's. Whose words a concept carries. A concept entry records a term the paper itself uses, so the term, the sense given for it, and its evidence are the paper's own words, quoted where the paper fixes them. This is the opposite of a sense entry in the tag table, which is the tagger's sentence about how the paper uses a term. Where a concept entry could not be grounded in the paper's words, the entry says so on its own row.

Tag layer © the Meta-Tagging Project, CC BY 4.0. The paper text is © its authors/publisher and is linked, not reproduced. Excerpts shown are short quotations for identification and verification. · back to index · concepts · authors · עברית
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