PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS IN ENGLISH: VARIATION THROUGH LEXICAL INSERTION

Abstract

This paper presents a piece of research based on corpus evidence of variation on idiomatic expressions through lexical insertion. Second only to lexical substitution, this type of phenomenon is pervasive especially in media discourse where phraseological units are frequently modified for various reasons. We claim that inserted adjectives represent an ever-increasing means of instantiating these multi-word units and that their recurrence bears out the semantic analysability of some of their constituent parts. We also introduce the concept of ‘variational collocates’, a regular paradigm of adjectives collocating with the nominal base of a phraseological unit. We show that this type of idiom variation is not entirely dependent on context by arguing that inserted adjectives can have diverse and contrasting semantic values.