Decomposability and the syntactic flexibility of Hebrew idioms

Idioms seem to be restricted in their syntactic flexibility (i.e., their ability to undergo syntactic operations) compared to literal phrases, but at the same time they also differ from one another along this metric. One of the most prominent accounts of this phenomenon is provided by Nunberg et al. (1994), who suggest that it is semantic decomposability, i.e. the ability to distribute the figurative meaning of idioms over their parts, which determines their syntactic flexibility. While idiom decomposability has been widely discussed in the literature and its relevance to idioms’ syntactic flexibility tested in several languages, its classification criteria and effect on flexibility remain unclear. To shed more light on this issue, we conducted a series of three experiments on Hebrew idioms, which to date had not been experimentally studied in this regard. The experiments were designed to compare the behavior of decomposable vs. non-decomposable idioms, as well as literal vs. idiomatic interpretations of the same phrases, focusing on three syntactic operations: pronominalization, fronting and adjectival modification. Overall, our results align with previous work in other languages pointing to a possible (weak) effect of decomposability on syntactic flexibility, though this effect emerged only in a post-hoc analysis averaging across operations. Potential implications of these tentative results for competing theories of idiom storage and interpretation are discussed.