The Syntactic Flexibility of English Idioms: A Preliminary Corpus Study

Current theories about the syntactic flexibility of idiomatic expressions are difficult to apply to fields such as TESOL for two reasons: (1) they contradict one another and (2) they rely heavily on speaker intuition, which tends to make their conclusions inconsistent with evidence from actual usage. This thesis first examines five such theories from prominent studies and then tests these theories against a corpus of newspaper articles from English-speaking countries. Several samples from the corpus directly contradict the predictions of the theories. These findings are intended to act as a springboard for future, larger-scale corpus studies that could develop a usage-based theory of the syntactic behavior of idioms that would be more useful to teachers and learners of English.

Thesis Author: Barnes, Ted

Year Completed: 2003

Committee Members: Dallin Oaks, Wendy Baker

Thesis Chair: William Eggington