"Constructions" and grammar: Evidence from idioms

The paper presents results of our investigation of the distribution of idioms across diatheses (voice alternations) in English and Hebrew. We propose an account and discuss its consequences for idiom storage and its implications for alternative architectures of grammar. We provide evidence that idioms split into two distinct subtypes, which we label "phrasal" versus "clausal" idioms. Based on idiom surveys, we observe that phrasal idioms can be specific to the transitive, the unaccusative or the adjectival passive diathesis, but cannot be specific to the verbal passive. Clausal idioms, in contrast, do not discriminate between diatheses: they tend to be specific to a single diathesis. These findings, we argue, cannot be accommodated by a Construction Grammar approach, such as Goldberg (2006), which assumes knowledge of language consists merely of an inventory of stored 'constructions', and does not distinguish between a storage module versus a computational system, attributing all significant grammatical generalizations to inheritance networks relating stored entities, and general cognitive and functional constraints. An adequate theory of idioms must have recourse to a distinction between stored items and unstored derivational outputs, and to grammatical distinctions. We outline an account of the findings, distinguishing between diatheses according to where they are formed, and assigning different storage to idioms according to whether their head is lexical or functional.