Decomposability and the syntactic flexibility of Hebrew idioms

What it is about

Idioms differ in how far they allow syntactic operations (pronominalization, fronting, adjectival modification). Nunberg et al. (1994) proposed that this depends on semantic decomposability: whether the figurative meaning can be spread over the parts of the idiom. The authors test this for Hebrew, which had not been studied experimentally in this respect. They ran pretests (decomposability classification, familiarity), then three acceptability experiments comparing decomposable and non-decomposable idioms, and idiomatic and literal readings of the same strings. No single experiment showed the predicted interaction. A post-hoc analysis that pooled the three experiments found a main effect of idiom type, with decomposable idioms judged more acceptable overall (p < 0.001), and the authors report this as a weak effect that needs replication.

Ideas

• I1. A decomposability field on each idiom in the idiom base of prag, set by the same criterion as the classification pretest. The field then limits which idiomatic readings may pass to a frame under fronting or modification, and gives a reason for the decision.
• I2. A tree check: an idiom keeps its figurative reading under fronting only when its non-literal words form one constituent in the UD tree, and under modification only when the modifier attaches inside a decomposable part. Test on the example idioms of the paper.
• I3. A Hebrew idiom test set with literal controls (same strings, literal reading), enough items per cell for the three operations, so that a Mova claim about idiom flexibility is measured per operation and not only pooled.

For Mova

I1 goes into the idiom base of prag and into 8. Lexicon and register. I2 goes into 7. Syntax as a rule. I3 is a test set for prag, run before any claim about idioms.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.16995/glossa.23489

@article{dolev2025decomposability,
  title = {{Decomposability and the syntactic flexibility of Hebrew idioms}},
  author = {Dolev, Tom and Siloni, Tal},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.16995/glossa.23489},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.23489}
}

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