Rethinking idiomaticity

Ask English speakers which of two phrases sounds more idiomatic, and they usually choose 'take the plunge' over 'write a letter'. This book investigates what drives those intuitions. Working within a usage-based framework, it asks which factors speakers draw on when they judge whether a construction is idiomatic.

The author treats idiomaticity as a multifaceted notion made up of semantic and formal dimensions of variation. The study combines a quantitative corpus analysis with quantitative data from speaker judgements, which the author presents as the first work to pair these two methods for this purpose.

The book is aimed at researchers and postgraduate students in lexicography, phraseology and corpus linguistics, as well as anyone using quantitative methods. Cognitive linguists who want to test the empirical foundations of their theories will also find it relevant.