A thorough investigation into idioms and their grand meaning, including how best to analyze them.

Any theory of idioms should be part and parcel of a general theory of grammar, adding as little machinery to one's overall grammatical approach as possible in describing both the syntactic and semantic idiosyncrasies and regularities of this large class of linguistic expressions.  This volume presents several lexicalist analyses of idioms within the framework of Sign-Based Construction Grammar, reflecting three guiding principles: many but not all idioms are syntactically and semantically compositional, dividing into distinct classes; idioms are analyzable in terms of a suitably rich lexicon and a set of constructions (lexical and syntactic rules) with corresponding meaning representations; and idiomaticity is a gradient phenomenon, exhibiting wide variation in degree of syntactic flexibility and meaning.

Paul Kay is professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley and adjunct professor of linguistics at Stanford University. Laura Michaelis is professor of linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Colorado Boulder and a Faculty Fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Science. She was a founding editor of the Cambridge University Press journal Language and Cognition: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language and Cognitive Science. Ivan A. Sag (1949–2013) was professor of linguistics at Stanford University. He was the author of Syntactic Theory, 2nd Edition, German in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Interrogative Investigations, Sign-Based Construction Grammar, and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Dan Flickinger was a senior research associate at the Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University and coeditor of Collected Papers of Martin Kay.
 

Foreword vii
1 A Lexical Theory of Phrasal Idioms 1
1.1 Introduction 1
1.2 The Analysis of Syntactically Flexible Expressions 6
1.3 The Analysis of Semi-Fixed Expressions 13
1.4 Super-Flexible Idioms 21
1.5 Locality and Idiomaticity 41
1.6 Locality 56
1.7 Idiom Words Governed by Non-Idiom Predicators 62
1.8 Conclusion 64
2 Partial Inversion in English 68
2.1 Uniformity and diversity in the split subject family
of constructions: the basic data 74
2.2 Sign-Based Construction Grammar 93
2.3 Agreement 97
2.4 The Split Subject Construction 102
2.5 Oblique Inversion (OI) 107
2.6 Presentational there 137
2.7 Deictic Inversion 139
2.8 Existential There 146
2.9 Reversed Specficational be (RS-be) 156
2.10 Conclusion 159