Nanyang Technological University
Linguistics and Multilingual Studies
Final Year Project

Losing One’s Mind Over Meaning:
Analysing the Behaviour of English
Possessive Idioms

Author:Jia Qian Ho

Supervisor:
Associate Professor Francis Bond

August 10, 2015

Contents
Acknowledgementsvi

Abstractvii

1

Introduction

1

2

Literature Review

2

3

Scope and Aims

4

4

Motivations

5

5

Methodology

7

6

Results and Discussion
6.1 Syntactic analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
6.1.1 Alternation in Idioms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
6.1.2 Prepositional phrasal idioms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
6.1.3 Transformation in idioms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
6.2 Decomposability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
6.3 Plausibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
6.4 Further semantic analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
6.4.1 Integration into WordNet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
6.4.2 Semantic variation in the BNC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

16
16
16
19
20
20
23
24
24
26

7

Future Work

28

8

Conclusion

28

9Bibliography

30

10 Appendix A

34

11 Appendix B

39

vi

Acknowledgements
This thesis paper emerged from my Undergraduate Research Experience on CAmpus (URECA) projectand provides a much deeper analysis of possessive idioms, which would not have been possible if not
for the help of and support from several individuals.
Foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor, Francis Bond whose idea formed the basis of thisproject. I was fortunate to work with him on my URECA project, which was in turn extended into
my FYP-URECA. The URECA project piqued my interest in possessive idioms and inspired me toinvestigate further and provide a more quantitative and qualitative analysis. Although I was unfamiliar
with computational linguistics, Francis guided me patiently and helped me in very technical areas.
Thank you, Francis, for your guidance and help.
I also wish to extend my gratitude to Dan Flickinger, who added templates into the ERG; for which
without this, we would not have been able to automatically construct and parse the idioms and I would
not have been able to carry out my analysis proper. Thank you for your help and for tolerating ourmultiple Skype sessions.
My thanks go out to my family – for giving me the much-needed moral support for this semesterlong project. Despite not knowing much about the university education system, much less about
Linguistics, your presence and confidence in me do mean a lot.
Lastly, I would like to thank you readers, for taking an interest in my thesis and the time to readthrough it. I hope that by the end of this thesis, you would have gotten a deeper insight into thesyntactic and semantic complexities of possessive idioms. So let’s put on our thinking caps and begin
with the paper!
Ho Jia Qian

vii

Abstract
Idioms are commonly found in everyday language and reflect the conventionalisations in speech communities. Regarding English idioms, past research have examined the syntactic and semantic analysis of idioms (Villavicencio & Copestake, 2002), along with their decomposability (Nunberg, 1978;
Gibbs, 1989a,b) and comprehension (Titone & Connine, 1994; Cacciari & Tabossi, 2014). However,there has been little research on English possessive idioms despite their uniqueness and interesting
properties. This thesis thus seeks to analyze the syntax and semantics of possessive idioms and describe their behaviour in terms of their decomposability and plausibility. A total of 514 idioms werecategorized into co-indexed and separate possessive idioms and then grouped syntactically in order
to be incorporated into new templates in the English Resource Grammar (Flickinger, 2011). Subsequently, the meaning of either each idiom component or paraphrase component was linked to WordNet(Fellbaum, 1998a) by choosing the most appropriate sense. The resulting comprehensive syntactic
and semantic idiom descriptions allowed for analyses of their syntax, semantics, decomposability andplausibility. Results demonstrated the interplay between syntax and semantics and revealed novel
aspects of possessive idioms, such as alternation and transformation in idioms. Furthermore, results
confirmed that a degree of decomposability exists and suggested that possessive idioms could be categorized into four groups according to their projectability. The comprehensive idiom database will
be released under an open license where it can be used as a dictionary and to further improve natural
language processing applications.

11Introduction

Despite being commonly found in everyday language, idioms cannot be integrated into any theory ofgrammar in a straightforward manner (Fellbaum, 2014: 777) and are thus still poorly represented inlexicons such as WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998a) and in grammars like the English Resource Grammar(Flickinger, 2011).
Idiomatic expressions, for instance by and large, devil’s advocate, play with fire, a taste of one’s
own medicine, clearly exemplify the wide spectrum of idioms, syntactically, semantically and discursively (Langlotz, 2006: 1). Consequently, there is no agreed-upon definition and classificationof idioms (Cigconi et al., 1999: 280; Langlotz, 2006: 2). Traditionally, idioms have been viewed
as conventional multiword expressions (MWEs) that are structurally fixed and semantically opaque(Langlotz, 2006: 2). The opposing camp views idioms as expressions that allow for lexical and syntactic variation, albeit each to a different degree (Gibbs, 1989a; Villavicencio & Copestake, 2002).
Adopting the view that idioms are not frozen semantic units, this thesis seeks to further analyze
this group of MWEs. Specifically, amongst the thousands of English idioms, this thesis focuses onpossessive idioms, which are termed as “verb-based prototypical idioms’ (O’Grady, 1998; Nenonen,
2007; both cited in Sameha, 2012: 5). However, we will see in Section 6.1.2 that possessive idioms
are not always verb-based, and may instead be preposition-based.
Nonetheless, at this point, possessive idioms are expressions whereby the verb or verb phrase (VP)
precedes a prepositional phrase (PP) or noun phrase (NP), within which the noun is possessed by anentity, which is typically the subject (Sameha, 2012: 5). A possessive adjective (my, her, our…)
marks this possessor-possessed relationship. (1a) illustrates a co-indexed possessive idiom whereby
the subject Mary co-indexes with the pronoun her to demonstrate that the noun mind is possessedby Mary and conveys “Mary becomes crazy”. Contrastingly, (1b) is ungrammatical in the intended
reading since the gender and number of the possessive adjective (neutral and plural) disagrees withthat of Mary (feminine and singular).
(1) a. Mary loses her mind. “Mary becomes crazy”
b. #Mary loses their mind.
The subject need not always co-index with the possessive adjective, as in a separate possessive
idiom. For instance in break someone’s heart (2a), the noun heart is possessed by the pronoun mywhich is not co-indexed with the subject Mary, to express “causes someone great sorrow”. In contrast,(2b) is ungrammatical in the intended reading since the possessive adjective her co-indexes with thesubject Mary.
(2) a. Mary breaks my heart. “Mary causes me great sorrow”
b. #Maryi breaks heri (own) heart.
By integrating the co-indexed and separate possessive idioms into the English Resource Grammar (ERG) and WordNet, this paper seeks to analyze the syntactic and semantic behavior of possessive idioms. In addition, the newly created syntactic templates would be run through the British

2

National Corpus (The British National Corpus, 2007) to determine variants and understand the behaviour of possessive idioms. Lastly, this paper also would examine the relationship between decomposability and plausibility, which are two dimensions said to affect idiom comprehensibility (Titone& Connine, 1994, 1999).
The next section examines past linguistics research; following which, the methodology is explained. Section 6 presents the results and a syntactic and semantic discussion of the idioms while
Section 7 suggests areas for future work.

2

Literature Review

The study of idioms has been long-standing due to their heterogeneous nature which has posed problems to linguists aiming to describe their internal structure. Thus far, there have been many studies
on English idioms covering areas such as their syntactic categorisation (Villavicencio & Copestake,2002), their encoding for computational linguistics (Bond et al., 1996; Sag et al., 2002), their decomposability (Gibbs et al., 1989a,b; Nunberg et al., 1994), and their comprehension and processing(Titone & Connine, 1999; Cacciari & Tabossi, 2014).
The noncompositional and compositional approach are two approaches to the study of idioms.
The former, traditional approach treats idioms as lexical entries whose figurative meanings are arbitrarily associated with their constituent words (Chomsky, 1980; Fraser, 1970; van der Linden, 1992;
all cited in Titone & Connine, 1999: 1656). A prototypical example is the idiom kick the bucket,
whose literal meaning “to hit a bucket with one’s foot” has no semantic relation with the figurative
meaning “to die suddenly” (Titone & Connine, 1999: 1656). Thus, the noncompositional approachstates that the meaning of an idiom cannot be derived from that of its components.
In comparison, the compositional approach emphasizes on the non-arbitrary internal semantic andsyntactic structures of idioms in that the literal meanings of component words do contribute to thefigurative meaning (Titone & Connine, 1999: 1661). Nunberg (1978) first posited the idea that idioms may differ in their semantic compositionality (Titone & Connine, 1999: 1661). Correspondingly, Nunberg categorized the idioms into three groups. Normally decomposable idioms are thosein which a component is used literally in relation to the figurative meaning (such as question in pop thequestion which refers to a marriage proposal). Abnormally decomposable idioms have components
whose meanings are metaphorically linked to the figurative meaning (such as maker in meet one’s
maker which metaphorically relates to gods). Lastly, for nondecomposable idioms, their figurative
meanings are not compositionally obtained from their constituents (such as shoot the breeze “to chatidly and without purpose”).
Adopting this classification, Gibbs et al. (1989a) proposed the “idiom decomposition hypothesis”
which posited that idioms vary in the degree to which their individual components constitute the figurative meaning, and that this semantic decomposability affects the syntactic flexibility of idioms. For
instance, the decomposable idiom John laid down the law can be passivised into The law was laid
down by John, without changing the figurative meaning “to enforce the rules”. However, the nondecomposable idiom John kicked the bucket cannot be passivised into the bucket was kicked by John3

without affecting its idiomatic meaning “to die suddenly”. The relationship between semantic decomposability and syntactic variability is not always direct. For instance, the abnormally decomposable
idiom carry a torch “to be in love with” tended not to produce the figurative meaning in its passivised
form A torch for Sally was carried by Jim. Gibbs et al. (1989b) also suggested that decomposability isrelated to lexical flexibility. For example, the decomposable idiom button one’s lips can be changed
to fasten one’s lips without altering its figurative meaning, “to not say anything”. However, if thenondecomposable idiom kick the bucket is lexically changed to kick the pail, its figurative meaning,“to die suddenly” is lost.
In a more recent study, Nunberg et al. (1994) refined their argument and distinguished between
idiomatically combining expressions (ICEs) and idiomatic phrases (IPs) – a distinction which could bedetermined using five tests, namely modification, quantification, topicalization, ellipsis, and anaphora.
ICEs are idioms whose individual components contribute to the figurative meaning. For instance, inpull strings, pull is associated with “exploitation or exertion” while strings is metaphorically extended
to “personal relations”. Contrarily, IPs are idioms whose figurative meaning cannot be derived fromtheir constitutents, such as saw logs, whose meaning “sleep” cannot be obtained from the idiom’s
individual words.
However, there have been opponents to Nunberg et al.’s (1994) absolute, dichotomic separationof ICEs from IPs. As mentioned earlier, Gibbs et al. (1989a,b) view decomposability as a matterof degree. Additionally, Espinal and Mateu (2010) used the idiom V one’s head off to illustrate thatthe dichotomy view is empirically inadequate, since such idioms exhibit some compositionality but
neither pass all the five syntactic tests nor retain the aspectuality of the literal meaning. Titone andConnine (1999) also proposed a hybrid model, which attributes both noncompositional and compositional characteristics to idioms.
The aforementioned approaches clearly illustrate that compositionality and decomposability areoften used synonymously, hence necessitating their delineation. According to Abel (2003: 332), theformer is a theoretical concept important for generative grammar and which focuses on the combination of syntactic components and their phrasal and sentential meanings. In contrast, decomposability
is an attribute of idioms that involves a psycholinguistic aspect since it concerns speakers’ perceptionsof how individual word meanings contribute to idiomatic meanings. Unlike a nondecomposable idiom, a decomposable idiom is one whose component words contribute to its idiomatic meaning. To
differentiate between compositionality and decomposability, Abel (2003: 333) used the idioms missthe boat and kick the bucket. In the former decomposable idiom, the verb miss contributes compositionally to the idiomatic meaning, in that something is missed, or more specifically, “an opportunity is
missed”. Whereas in a truly compositional (or literal) reading, “a boat is missed”. In the latter nondecomposable idiom kick the bucket, the literal meaning is compositional while the idiomatic meaning
to die suddenly is noncompositional. There are also nondecomposable idioms that do not have any
compositional reading, such as shoot the breeze “to chat idly”. The awareness of the difference between compositionality and decomposability would in turn influence the scope and methodology thatwould be further elaborated on in subsequent sections.
Besides compositionality, idioms could be analyzed according to transparency and convention-

4

ality. Transparency refers to the ease of recovering the motivation for the figurative meaning (Nunberg
et al., 1994: 496), while conventionality is the degree to which figurative meanings cannot be predicted purely from knowledge of the constituent words and of the rules of a language environment(Nunberg et al., 1994: 492). Titone and Connine (1994) posited a fourth dimension – literality –which refers to the possibility for a literal reading. Literality in this sense deals with truth-conditional
literality (Cacciari, 2014: 29), otherwise termed as plausibility (Fellbaum, 2014: 787).
Studies have examined the relationship between compositionality and literality in influencing idiom processing. Titone and Connine (1999) demonstrated that idiom comprehension was faster whenliteral word meanings contributed to both figurative and literal interpretations of the expression (i.e.
decomposable idioms), than when they contributed only to the literal interpretation (i.e. nondecomposable idioms). Libben and Titone (2008) showed that idiom comprehension was more difficult when
an idiom is literally plausible and nondecomposable, than when the idiom is literally implausible.
However, other studies demonstrated that literality plays a lesser role in idiom activation. A study by
Caillies and Butcher (2007) demonstrated that ambiguous decomposable idioms were activated fasterthan nondecomposable idioms, thus suggesting that the figurative meaning of decomposable idioms
are stored in people’s memory and can be automatically recovered from the semantics of the expression, regardless of the literality degree – results that were also supported by another study (Caillies& Declerq, 2011: 19). However, Caillies and Butcher (2007: 100) mentioned that further researchshould explore the influence of compositionality on the activation of implausible idioms.
Regarding possessive idioms in particular, a previous study (Sameha, 2012) examined the syntactic
and semantic structures of 307 possessive idioms. Idioms were categorized into six VP idiom types
which were further analyzed into nineteen syntactic templates. Sameha concluded that conceptual
metaphors and image schemas could be used to explain how literal readings of idioms were linked
to their figurative senses. There was an intention to add the idioms into the ERG, which was not
executed in the end. Moreover, the idioms were not run through a large enough corpus to determine
the accuracy of the analysis.
There was a follow-up study (Ho & Bond, 2014) which explored the decomposability of possessive
idioms and linked them to WordNet. Results demonstrated that most idioms were nondecomposable
and the most common patterns for co-indexed and separate possession idioms were XNP V1 X’s N1
and XNP V1 YNP ’s N1 respectively. However, the authors acknowledged that more research had to bedone, since the frequency results of the decomposable and nondecomposable idioms conflicted withthat obtained in other studies (Gibb et al., 1989a; Villalencio & Copestake, 2002; both cited in Ho& Bond, 2014: 8). Furthermore, the research lacked a precise quantitative analysis, and similar toSameha’s study, analyses were not implemented in a grammar such as the ERG.

3

Scope and Aims

This thesis thus draws upon previous studies (Sameha, 2012; Ho & Bond, 2014) with the main aim ofdescribing the syntax and semantics of possessive idioms in good detail, so as to better analyze their
behaviour and work towards a broader goal of incorporating them into the ERG and WordNet.

5

A point to note is the large syntactic variation in idioms. In a study which looked at the mostfrequent English idioms (Villavicencio & Copestake, 2002), the idioms were first grouped syntactically which led to too much variation. Subsequently, a semantic classification which separated idioms
into decomposable and non-decomposable ones was deemed as a better approach. Nevertheless, thisthesis would still be examining the syntactic variation of possessive idioms due to the broader aim ofincorporating them into the grammar and lexicon. This involves describing the syntax and semantics
of idioms in great detail, such as their syntactic templates, figurative meanings and WordNet senses of
their components and paraphrase. This would permit a better quantitative and qualitative analysis of
the behaviour of idioms. Using the syntactic templates to integrate the idioms into the ERG would also
allow the idioms to be constructed for analysis and parsed in a corpus. Additionally, by representing
the idioms using WordNet, they could be run across a larger corpus to obtain variants for analysis.
In addition, this paper adopts the compositional approach. Within which, instead of taking thestrict dichotomy as espoused by Nunberg et al. (1994), this paper views decomposability as a matterof degree. Moreover, as mentioned in Section 2, this paper distinguishes between compositionality and decomposability, whereby the former is a theoretical concept while the latter refers to how
constituents contribute to an idiom’s figurative meaning. Henceforth, this paper would examine thedecomposability of English possessive idioms, which could in turn help to explain the relatively highpercentage of nondecomposable idioms in Ho and Bond’s (2014) study.
Another area of focus is the plausibility of idioms, which was one of the four dimensions in which
idioms can be analyzed (Titone & Connine, 1994), and which has a possible relation with compositionality (refer to Section 2). This paper hypothesizes that a more decomposable idiom would be moreplausible. This is because a less decomposable (or nondecomposable) idiom would have to have its
meaning interpreted as a whole and thus it would be difficult to obtain a literal reading. For instance,
while the decomposable idiom earn one’s keep means “to earn one’s livelihood”, it can also have aliteral reading. In contrast, the words in the nondecomposable idiom make one’s bones do not combine to constitute the figurative meaning, “to take actions to establish achievement, status or respect”.
Besides, it is impossible in reality to create one’s bones. Another reason for focusing on plausibility
as opposed to transparency and conventionality is due to the relative ease in judging plausibility.
Therefore, this paper has three main purposes centering around possessive idioms: first, to describe
and analyze their syntax and semantics so as to integrate them into the ERG and WordNet; second, todescribe their decomposability; third, to study the relation between decomposability and plausibility.

4

Motivations

There are several reasons for focusing on possessive idioms. Firstly, they are one of the more common
types of English idioms, as demonstrated in Villavicencio et al.’s study (2002), whereby 16.9% of themost frequent English idioms were possessive idioms. Their relative high frequency thus necessitatesthat they should be analysed more thoroughly.
Secondly, there is discontinuity in the possessive idiom, whereby the genitive slot can be replacedwith any possessive adjective or noun (Fellbaum, 1998b), thereby changing the figurative meaning.

6

For example, lose one’s mind can appear as I lose my mind “I become crazy”, or Kim loses her mind
“Kim becomes crazy”. Evidently, there is interaction between syntax and semantics which makes
possessive idioms hard to represent in the grammar and lexicon. Moreover, there might be longdistance dependencies, such as in Kim never intended to lose her mind, where the subject Kim does
not appear right next to the idiom lose her mind. A simple pattern matcher is unable to recognise thediscontinuity, which makes it difficult for possessive idioms to be represented in the grammar andlexicon (Wehrli, 1998: 1389). This thesis thus hopes to resolve this by shedding light on the syntactic
and semantic behaviour of possessive idioms.
Possessive idioms are also problematic for Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications suchas parsing (Sag et al., 2002) and machine translation (Shutova et al., 2012; cited in Muzny & Zettlemoyer, 2013: 1417). For instance, while the possessive adjective usually have to be omitted whentranslating from English to another language, it must be produced and agree with the subject when thetranslation goes the other way (Bond et al., 2013). The following examples which compare English
with French [(3)-(4)], Japanese [(5)-(6)], and German (7) illustrate that while the possessive adjective
is used in the English idioms, there is no equivalent in the target languages.
(3) El presidenti treia
el fetgei perla bocathe president got+out the liver through the mouth“The president worked his guts out.’’[French: Mateu and Espinal, 2007: 42](4) A la gerentai lii sortien els ullsi de la cara
to the manager CL went+out the eyes of the face
“The manager cried her eyes out.’’[French: Mateu and Espinal, 2007: 42](5) kanojo-wa chie-oshibotta
she-TOP knowledge-OBJ wrung“She racked her brains.”[Japanese: Bond et al., 1996: 2](6) kare-wa kono-shigoto-kara te-ohiita
he-TOP this-work-fromhands-OBJ pulled“He washed his hands of this work.”[Japanese: Bond et al., 1996: 7](7) jemanden
eine lange Nase machen
to-somebody along nose make“thumb one’s nose at somebody”[German: Fellbaum, 2014: 785]

Clearly, possessive idioms are a relatively unique characteristic of English. Consequently, a machine translation system has to determine when and which pronouns to use. A clearer syntactic andsemantic description of possessive idioms would allow for a better understanding of them and in turnenhance NLP applications, such as machine translation and computer-assisted language learning. It

7would also aid in incorporating idioms into dictionaries, which would be beneficial especially for
non-native speakers, due to the difficulty in understanding idioms.

5

Methodology

The initial list of possessive idioms was obtained from Sameha’s (2012) paper on English possessive idioms. These were in turn sourced from WordNet, augmented by the Collins Cobuild Idioms
Dictionary and checked against Dictionary.com to give 370 idioms (Sameha, 2012: 13). I then enhanced the list of idioms by verifying against two online dictionary resources, Dictionary.com andOxforddictionaries.com. The former is a popular online dictionary and contains data from multiple
dictionaries (Sameha, 2012: 13), while the latter has been documenting the English language for many
centuries. This thus ensured the comprehensiveness and reliability of the data. Similar to Sameha’s
selection criteria, the additional idioms were chosen based on the main criteria of the NP containing
the possessive adjective one’s. This resulted in about hundred more idioms. However, the final count
was at a grand total of 514 idioms. This was because some of these idioms were essentially the sameidioms, except that they either appear in both possession types, for instance change one’s mind versus
change someone’s mind, or were semantic variants, such as collect one’s wits and gather one’s wits,
or conveyed more than one idiomatic meaning, such as make one’s way.
These 514 idioms were broadly categorized into co-indexed and separate possessive idioms andfurther grouped syntactically, and arranged according to their frequency as shown in Tables 1 and 2
respectively. A range of symbols was used to represent the various syntactic templates. XNP denotes
variable noun phrases since it can refer to either Kim (8a) or John (8b). The same applies to YNP ,as evident in (9). While N denotes invariable nouns that predominantly belong to the possessive idiomatic construction, V denotes verb, P for preposition or particle, A for adjective, R for adverb, D for
determiner, aux for auxiliary and neg for negation. These abbreviations also have numbers appended
to them as there may be more than one of each syntactic category in a single idiomatic expression, as
shown in example (9), whereby N1 refers to piece whereas N2 refers to mind. Additionally, referring toTables 1 and 2, square brackets [ ] were used in the syntactic templates to denote prepositional phrases(PP) within the idioms. Within these brackets, P denotes a preposition since it heads a PP, whereas inother cases, P represents a particle.
(8) a. Kim loses her mind.
XNP V1 X’s N1“Kim becomes crazy.”b. John loses his mind.
XNP V1 X’s N1“John becomes crazy.”8(9) a. Kim gives John a piece of her mind.
XNP V1 YNP D1 N1
P1 X’s N2“Kim scolds John harshly.”b. John gives Kim a piece of his mind.
XNP V1 YNP D1 N1
P1 X’s N2“John scolds Kim harshly.”
Table 1
Types of Co-indexed Possessive Idioms
Structure
XNP V1 X’s N1
XNP V1 [P1 X’s N1 ]XNP V1 X’s N1 [P1 YNP ]XNP V1 X’s N1 [P1 D1 N2 ]XNP V1 X’s N1 P1
XNP V1 X’s own N1
XNP V1 +P1 X’s N1
XNP be [P1 X’s N1 ]XNP V1 X’s N1 [P1 X’s N2 ]XNP V1 D1 N1 [P1 X’s N2 ]XNP V1 X’s N1 A1
XNP V1 YNP [P1 X’s N1 ]XNP V1 X’s N1 (est)XNP V1 [P1 X’s N1 [P2 YNP ]]XNP aux+neg V1 X’s N1
XNP V1 YNP D1 N1 [P1 X’s N2 ]XNP V1 R1 A1 [P1 X’s N1 ]XNP V1 [P1 D1 N1 P2 X’s N2 ]XNP V1 N1 [P1 X’s N2 ]XNP V1 X’s N1 [P1 X]
XNP V1 X’s N1 and V2 N2Remainder
Total

ExampleFrequency
lose one’s mind137
fly off one’s handle
40
cast one’s lot [with someone/thing]39
have one’s head [in the clouds]
27
cry one’s eyes out
22
blow one’s own horn
18
pull up one’s socks
17
off one’s rocker
13
scratch one’s ear [with one’s elbow]
13
a dose [of one’s medicine]10
get one’s hands dirty
10
wind someone [around one’s finger]10
do one’s best
8
pour out one’s heart [to someone]7
not mince one’s words
5
give someone a piece [of one’s mind]
4
too big [for one’s boots]
3by the skin of one’s teeth
2have egg [on one’s face]2
have one’s wits [about one]2
have one’s cake and eat it2
let grass grow under one’s feet30421This table lists the co-indexed possessive idioms, arranged in order of frequency with the exception of the last group, remainder.

The idioms elicited twenty-one syntactic structures for the co-indexed possessive idioms and thirteen for the separate possessive idioms, with both groups comprising an additional category titledremainder, which consists of idioms that belong to none of the other categories. Referring to Table 1,
most of the categories follow the basic structure XNP V1 X’s N1 but with modifications such as PPs,

9adjectives and negation. Specifically, some templates would be elaborated upon.
The first is XNP V1 +P1 X’s N1 , for instance pull up one’s socks “to make an effort to improve
one’s behaviour or performance”, in which + denotes that the particle can also appear at the end of theidiomatic phrase without affecting the figurative meaning, as in pull one’s socks up. In XNP be [P1 X’s
N1 ], such as off one’s rocker “to be crazy”, the verb be is used instead of V1 as in the basic syntactic
category XNP V1 X’s N1 . The difference here is that idioms in the former group usually appear withthe be-verb, for instance Kim is off her rocker “Kim is crazy” and Kim is beyond her depth in physics
class “Kim is outside of her knowledge in physics”. Thus, they are placed under a separate template.
The idioms in the group XNP V1 X’s N1 (est), for example do one’s best “to do one’s utmost possible”,
also warrant their own category instead of being placed in the basic group. This is because the nouns
are the superlative forms of their respective adjectives and are decomposed as such in the ERG. For
instance, “best” is analyzed as “most good thing” while “worst” as “most bad thing”. Grouping theseidioms with those that belong to the group XNP V1 X’s N1 would make their incorporation into the ERG
difficult. Instead, having their own template would help in the subsequent ERG incorporation.
As for Table 2, one syntactic template to note is XNP V1 ZNP [P1 YNP ’s N1 ], which has an additional
denotation ZNP that refers to a variable NP in the idiomatic expression. For instance, the idiom ram
something down someone’s throat can appear as Kim rams ideas down Jim’s throat or they rammed
nonsense down my throat.
Table 2
Types of Separate Possessive Idioms
Structure
XNP V1 [P1 YNP ’s N1 ]XNP V1 YNP ’s N1
XNP V1 D1 N1 [P1 YNP ’s N2 ]XNP V1 N1 [P1 YNP ’s N2 ]XNP V1 YNP ’s N1 [P1 N2 ]XNP V1 YNP ’s N1 P1
XNP V1 neg N1 [P1 YNP ’s N2 ]XNP V1 X [P1 YNP ’s N1 ]XNP V1 YNP D1 N1 [P1 Y’s N1 ]XNP V1 YNP [P1 Y’s N1 ]XNP V1 YNP R1 [P1 Y’s N1 ]XNP V1 YNP Y’s N1
XNP V1 ZNP [P1 YNP ’s N1 ]Remainder
Total

Examplebreathe [down someone’s neck]catch someone’s eye
a thorn [in someone’s flesh]send shivers [down someone’s spine]
put someone’s mind [at rest]
bite someone’s head off
no skin [off someone’s back]put oneself [in someone’s shoes]
give someone a run [for someone’s money]
bring someone [to someone’s knees]
set someone back [on someone’s heels]give someone someone’s dues
ram something [down someone’s throat]leave a bad taste in someone’s mouthFrequency
21
18
10
6
5
5
3
3
3
2
2
2
2
11
93

This table lists the separate possessive idioms, arranged in order of frequency with the exception of thelast group, remainder.

10With reference to (10) and (11) – henceforth termed as idiom entries for reference purpose – thenext step involved providing the definition of each idiom, by referring to the Collins Cobuild Idioms
Dictionary, Dictionary.com and Oxforddictionaries.com. Thereafter, I assessed the literal senses of
the individual components of each idiom and should the idiom be regarded as decomposable, a corresponding synonym or metaphorical extension for each component word was decided upon and marked
with an asterisk as illustrated in (10). In all instances, the literal and figurative senses were determined
and carefully chosen from WordNet. The decomposability of an idiom was listed using the feature@type.
To reiterate, idiom decomposability refers to how individual components contribute to the figurative meaning. In this thesis, this was determined by semantic substitution, which is the possibilityof substituting each lexical component with an appropriate word without altering figurative meanings. For instance, in (10), eat can be metaphorically extended to mean “swallow/withdraw” (*V1 )while words with “statement” (*N1 ), to give “withdraw one’s statement”. The figurative meaning of
eat one’s words generally remains unchanged, thus rendering this idiom decomposable. In contrast,in (11), twiddle and thumb cannot be replaced with suitable synonyms nor metaphorical extensions,
without altering the syntactic structure and figurative meaning “to do nothing”. Consequently, twiddle
one’s thumb is a nondecomposable idiom. To further exemplify, semantic substitution is the replacement of each lexical component with an equivalent synonym. Thus, in nail one’s colour to the mast,its main lexical parts – nail, colour and mast – cannot be semantically substituted without affecting thefigurative meaning “to explicitly voice one’s opinion regarding an issue”, hence rendering this idiom
nondecomposable. Thus, semantic substitution is important for determining decomposability in thisthesis.
Lastly, all the idioms were given paraphrases which were restricted, linked to WordNet and marked
with @ in the idiom entries. In cases whereby the paraphrase was headed by a verb (10), the verb
paraphrase (@V ) would be the hypernym1 of the idiom; whereas when the paraphrase involved the
be-form (11), the adjective paraphrase (@A) would be the hypernym of the idiom. Thus, by restricting
the paraphrase and linking its senses to WordNet in the idiom entries, this allowed the basic essenceof each idiom to be captured and illustrated its hyponymy relation to lexical entries already listed in
WordNet.
1

Fellbaum (1998b: 56) suggested using the concept of “troponymy” to accommodate verb phrase idioms into WordNet.
However, I would replace this term with “hypernymy/hyponymy” which would be further explained in Section 6.4.1.

11




(10) Idiom entry
Index form eat one’s words
TemplateExampleExampleDefinition


V
 1


N1

∗
 V1




∗ N
 1



@typeParaphrase@template




@V




@N








XNP V1 X’s N1Kim eats her words
Kim is going to have to eat her words
to retract one’s statement, especially with humility
S: (v) eat (take in solid food)
S: (n) words (the words that are spoken)
S: (v) swallow, take back, unsay, withdraw (take back what one has said)

S: (n) statement (a message that is stated or declared; a communication (oral or written) setting forth particulars or facts etc)
decomposable
X retracts statement



XVN



S: (v) abjure, recant, forswear, retract, resile (formally reject or disavow 
a formerly held belief, usually under pressure)
S: (n) statement (a message that is stated or declared; a communication (oral or written) setting forth particulars or facts etc)(11) Idiom entry
Index form twiddle one’s thumbsTemplateExampleDefinition




V1



N1



@typeParaphrase@template



@A







XNP V1 X’s N1Kim twiddles her thumbs
to do nothing
S: (v) twiddle, fiddle with (manipulate, as in a nervous or unconsciousmanner)
S: (n) thumb, pollex (the thick short innermost digit of the forelimb) Nondecomposable
X is idle
X BE A

S: (adj) idle (not in action or at work))

Referring to (10) and (11), it is evident that the idiom entries clearly describes the syntax andsemantics of the idioms by encompassing their syntactic templates, sentence examples, definitions,
literal and figurative meanings, decomposability and paraphrases. With a total of 514 idioms, I thus
created the most substantial, detailed description of possessive idioms in existence – a major contribution to the study of idioms.

12

The various syntactic templates were then incorporated into the English Resource Grammar (ERG:
Flickinger, 2011), which is a broad-coverage, declarative English grammar built upon the Head-driven
Phrase Structure Grammar schema, with the help of Flickinger himself. To enable the recognition of
the idioms in parsing, the verbs and nouns in the idiomatic expression had to be linked together. Thiswas done with the id.rel marker on the verb to link it with its argument. Another marker was ’s
poss.rel which marks the possessive relationship between the possessor and possessed noun, either
lexicalized as ’s or incorporated into the possessive determiner (my, her, our…).
Using these newly created ERG syntactic templates, we were able to automatically construct,compile and parse the idioms. This was done by combining the ERG templates with the lexicon in
the Type Description Language (Krieger & Schäfer, 1994) and idioms in the Machine Translation
Rules (Oepen, 2008), before running the idioms through the Answer Constraint Engine (Packard,2013). Constituent trees, feature structures and Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRSs: Copestake etal., 2005) of the idioms were obtained from the Linguistic User Interface (LkbLui, n.d.).
Example (12a) illustrates a co-indexed possessive idiom with the structure XNP V1 X’s N1 , with its
MRS in (12b) and its simplified version in (12c) for easier understanding. There are several importantelements present in the grammar of get one’s break. The first is the idiomatic rule (12a) that is obtained
from incorporating the syntactic template listed in its idiom entry into the ERG, and which ensuresthat the predicates and the possessive relation are present. Referring to (12b), the second element
would be the lexical entries _get_v_i and _break_n_1_rel. In (12c), the entry _get_v_i associates theproper noun Kim with the verb break, while poss.rel indicates that the noun break is possessed by the
subject, which co-indexes with the possessive adjective. The last element is id_rel which links theverb get with the proper noun Kim (the subject) and the pronoun her (the possessor of the object). This
association thus captures minor variations, such as number and spelling variations (Bond et al., 2013:4). For instance, in (w)rack one’s brains, both the singular and plural forms of brain are accepted in
dictionaries. During the construction of such idioms, the number would be underspecified so as topermit both the singular and plural entries. Similarly, rack can be spelled as wrack. Assuming thatboth words carry the same meaning, id_rel thus allows two orthographically different words to havethe same predicate and be recognised as the same idiom during parsing.
(12) a. Kimi gets heri break.

[XNP V1 X’s N1 ]

13


b.

mrs



TOP


INDEX



























RELS
































HCONS







ICONS





0 h




2 e



 




 _get_v_i_rel id_rel proper_q_rel  named_rel  LBL
LBL



4 h 
1 h 
1 h 


 LBL  LBL






7 h



 

, ARG0 2 e , ARG0 10 i , 
ARG0
3 x ,  CARG ”kim” 

 



 


RSTR
 ARG1 3 x  ARG1 3 x  
5
h


 


3 x
 ARG0 
BODY 6 h
ARG2 9 x
ARG2 11 x 







pronoun_q_rel
poss_rel











LBL


15 h LBL
17 h  pron_rel
⟨
⟩













ARG0 16 e , ARG0
11 x , LBL
20 h,










 ARG0 11 x
ARG1 9 x  RSTR
18
h










ARG2 11 x BODY 19 h







def_explicit_q_rel  





LBL

12 h


 _break_n_1_rel 









ARG0
, LBL
9 x
15 h









RSTR

13 h


 ARG0 9 xBODY 14 h










⟨qeq
 qeq qeq qeq
⟩ 







HARG 0 h, HARG 5 h, HARG 13 h, HARG 18 h














LARG 1 h LARG 7 h LARG 15 h LARG 20 h




⟨⟩





c. get(Kimi , break)poss_rel (her , break)i

id_rel(Kimi , heri , get)







The other idiom types were constructed in a similar manner. However, some were done manuallyeither because their frequency was too low to render the creation of their ERG templates or becauseof the way constituents are written in the ERG. For instance, in (13), the idiom do one’s best cannot
properly fit into the ERG template XNP V1 X’s N1 because of two reasons; the first being that best is thesuperlative of the word good while the second being that there exists an additional relation, whereby
good refers to a “thing”, which is absent from the idiom itself. This posed a problem to its automaticconstruction and compilation and hence had to be manually added into the database.

14(13) a. Kimi does heri best.
b. do




best





poss





(Kimi , thing)most (good) good (thing) (heri , thing)

id_rel (Kimi , heri ), do

In this thesis, ERG templates and the automatic construction and compilation were done only forthe co-indexed possession idioms, since they are more problematic for translation. However the same
framework can be applied to the separate possessive idioms as future work. Moreover, due to thecomplex syntactic nature of many co-indexed possessive idioms, analyses were only provided for
those with frequencies higher than ten (Table 1).
After automatically constructing and compiling the idiomatic entries, the entries in the ERG werecombined with WordNet to obtain variants. This was possible since the senses of the component
words were linked to WordNet right from the beginning during the creation of the idiom entries (referto (10) and (11)). Consequently, a depth command was introduced and restricted in order to generate synonyms and hyponyms which were one level down from the verbs and nouns in each idiom.
The variants were then run through the British National Corpus (BNC: The British National Corpus,
2007), a large corpus of 100 million word samples of written and spoken British English, in orderto determine the syntactic and semantic flexibility of the possessive idioms. Due to time constraints,
only the 137 idioms belonging to the category XNP V1 X’s N1 were run through the BNC. This entailed
two preliminary experiments. The first involved manually determining how many listings of two particular idioms were lost during parsing while the second was a fully automatic parsing of the 137
idioms and their WordNet variants to examine how many were interpreted as idioms. It also entailed
manually analyzing the sentences which were parsed as containing idioms, and judging if the parses
were accurate.
A decomposability scale was also generated from the idiom entries so as to better examine thedecomposability of idioms. The scale was tabulated based on two aspects – first being whether theindividual component had a corresponding synonym or metaphorical extension (represented by *);second being the similarity between the resulting senses and the original senses of the individual
words. To illustrate, referring back to (11), twiddle one’s thumb is considered nondecomposable
since its component parts cannot be paraphrased, as evident from the absence of ∗ V and ∗ N.
In comparison, (14) to (16), which are the simplified versions of their respective idiom entries,
illustrate decomposable idioms, albeit to different degrees. In (14), the main lexical items button
and lip are metaphorically extended to “control” and “speech” respectively. Whereas in (15), change
retains its meaning while tune extends metaphorically to “opinion”. Lastly, in (16), the idiom keep
one’s temper is decomposable but its component words have the exact same senses in both the literaland figurative senses.
As the methodology involved semantic substitution, the concept of projection was used to groupthe idioms. Idioms such as that in (16) were labelled non-projected since the senses of their con-

15

stituents remained unchanged during semantic substitution. Moving along the scale, idioms similar to(15) were termed as partially projected since some of its components retained their original meaning
while others mapped onto other words. The next group was similar to (14), which was labelled fully
projectable since all their components had a one-to-one connection with the words that they were
mapped to. On the other end, nondecomposable idioms such as (11) were termed as non-projectable.
Therefore, the decomposability scale would reflect idiom decomposability by looking at the conceptof projectability.
In order to examine how decomposability and plausibility correlate, five idioms from each syntactic template were randomly obtained for analysis. Since each idiom had an identification number
attached to it, this allowed an integer set generator to generate five numbers at random (Random Integer Set Generator, 1998). For templates which had less than five idioms, analysis involved all theidioms belonging to that particular template. Subsequently, the idiom samples were examined for theirdecomposability based on the decomposability scale. Finally, they were analysed for their plausibility
and a matrix was outlined to determine if the two dimensions interact.
(14) Idiom entry – fully projectedIndex form button one’s lipTemplateDefinition


V
 1



N
 1



∗
 V1



∗ N
 1


@type







XNP V1 X’s N1to keep quiet, especially to refrain from revealing information
S: (v) button (fasten with buttons)
S: (n) lip (either of two fleshy folds of tissue that surround the mouthand play a role in speaking)S: (v) control, hold in, hold, contain, check, curb, moderate (lessen the
intensity of; temper; hold in restraint; hold or keep within limits)
S: (n) speech (something spoken)

decomposable(15) Idiom entry – partially projectedIndex form change one’s tune
TemplateDefinition


V1




N
 1


∗
 V1 = V1



∗ N
 1









XNP V1 X’s N1to change one’s opinion, especially since it benefits one
S (v) switch, shift, change (lay aside, abandon, or leave for another) S: (n) tune, melody, air, strain, melodic line, line, melodic phrase (asuccession of notes forming a distinctive sequence)





S: (n) opinion, sentiment, persuasion, view, thought (a personal beliefor judgment that is not founded on proof or certainty)


@type

decomposable

16




(16) Idiom entry – non-projectedIndex form keep one’s temperTemplateDefinition



V1




N1

∗
 V1 = V1∗ N = N
 1
1








XNP V1 X’s N1to refrain from showing anger and remain poise
S: (v) restrain, keep, keep back, hold back (prevent the action or ex-pression of)S: (n) pique, temper, irritation (a sudden outburst of anger)









@type

decomposable

6

Results and Discussion

6.1

Syntactic analysis

The comprehensive idiom entries led to the discovery of several novel syntactic aspects of possessive
idioms, which would be further discussed in the following subsections.
6.1.1

Alternation in Idioms

An analysis revealed that some of the possessive idioms appeared in alternation pairs, which typicallyhave verbs in the give-get relationship, as exemplified by six (S/N 1-6) out of the eleven idioms inTable 3.
Though each alternation pair could be found in both their co-indexed and separate possessive structure, it is apparent that possession types and idiom alternation have no relation. This is exemplified
in Table 3, whereby both co-indexed (e.g. get one’s dues) and separate possessive (e.g. get a piece ofsomeone’s mind) idioms are grouped under cause-type idiom; and vice versa for the result-type idiom
category. Thus, instead of possession type, I argue that it is the verb type that results in the alternation pairs. Furthermore, rather than a reciprocal relationship between the alternation pairs, I contend
that the association is one-way, whereby the idioms typically with give verbs – henceforth referred as
cause-type idioms – result in those with get – hereafter termed as result-type idioms.
An analysis of the 514 idioms revealed that many other idioms have get or have verbs, but do nothave their cause-type alternations. Examples include get one’s hands dirty “to do something shamefulor illegal” and have one’s eye on something ”to have as one’s objective”. The same applies to separate
possessive idioms, like get under someone’s skin “to annoy or to impact someone deeply” and get themonkey off someone’s back “to end a problem”. In comparison, the result-type alternation could befound for all the idioms with the give verb. Consequently, we can conclude that it is the cause-typeidioms that result in their result-type alternations.
The initial analysis was that it was typically idioms which contain give that lead to their alternations
which contain get or have. However, Table 3 shows that both groups involve other verbs, such as put

17
Table 3
Alternation in Idioms
S/N
1
2
3

4

5
6

Cause-type Idiom
give someone someone’s dues
XNP V1 YNP Y’s N1

Result-type Idiom
get one’s dues
YNP V1 Y’s N1

give someone someone’s walking papers get one’s walking papers
XNP V1 YNP Y’s N1
YNP V1 Y’s N1
give someone a dose/taste of someone’s get/receive/have/need a dose/taste of one’s
own medicine
own medicine
XNP V1 YNP D1 N1 [P1 Y’s N1 ]YNP V1 D1 N1 [P1 Y’s N2 ]give someone a run for someone’s get/have a run for one’s money
money
XNP V1 YNP D1 N1 [P1 Y’s N1 ]YNP V1 D1 N1 [P1 Y’s N2 ]give someone a piece of one’s mind
XNP V1 YNP D1 N1 [P1 X’s N2 ]get a piece of someone’s mind
YNP V1 D1 N1 [P1 XNP ’s N2 ]give someone the rough edge of one’s get the rough edge/side of someone’s tongue
tongueXNP V1 YNP D1 A1 N1 [P1 X’s N2 ]YNP V1 D1 A1 N1 [P1 XNP ’s N2 ]7

put someone’s nose out of joint
XNP V1 YNP ’s N1 [P1 N2 ]get/have one’s nose out of joint
YNP V1 Y’s N1 [P1 N2 ]8bring someone out of someone’s shell
XNP V1 YNP [P1 Y’s N1 ]come out of one’s shell
YNP V1 [P1 Y’s N1 ]9

get/have/take someone under one’s wing be/come under someone’s wing
XNP V1 YNP [P1 X’s N1 ]YNP V1 [P1 XNP ’s N1 ]10

have/keep someone under one’s thumb
XNP V1 YNP [P1 X’s N1 ]11

be under someone’s thumb
YNP V1 [P1 XNP ’s N1 ]let someone/thing slip through one’s fin- slip through someone’s fingers
gers
XNP V1 N1 V2 [P1 X’s N2 ]YNP V1 XNP ’s N1

The templates listed under result-type idiom differ slightly from the original templates listed in Table 1 andTable 2. This is because of the need to show the relation between the idioms in the two alternations and toshow that the animate noun denoted by YNP in the cause-type idiom is essentially the same referent expressedin the result-type idiom.

and bring in the cause-type category, and come in the result-type category. The eleven idiom pairs
should thus be further analyzed into two groups. Specifically, the cause-type verbs in idioms S/N 1-6
convey a change in possession while those in S/N 7-11 indicate a change in motion. The cause-typeidioms thus express a causation of possession or motion, meanings which are also conveyed in double
object or prepositional object dative constructions present in English (Levin & Hovav, 2007; Krifka,

18

2004: 13).
(17a) and (18a) illustrate that there exist three thematic roles – agent, object, theme/goal (Krifka,
2004). In the cause-type idioms, verbs such as give, put and bring permit three thematic roles which
in turn convey a change in possession or motion. Specifically, the agent does something to cause achange in possession (theme) or motion (goal). Consequently, the “permissive agent” (Oehrle, 1976)
acts as a causer which leads to the animate object receiving or experiencing a theme or goal, as illustrated in (17b) and (18b). Correspondingly, such idioms are termed as result-type idioms, which
are alternations of their cause-type idioms.
(17) a. [Kim]agent gives [Jim]obj his [walking papers]objThemeXNP V1 YNP Y’s N1“Kim fires Jim.”

cause-type idiom

b. [Jim]agent gets his [walking papers]objThemeYNP V1 Y’s N1“Jim is fired.”result-type idiom(18) a. [Kim]agent gets [Jim]obj under her [wing]objGoal
XNP V1 YNP P1 X’s N1“Kim guides/protects Jim.”

cause-type idiom

b. [Jim]agent comes under Kim’s [wing]objGoal
YNP V1 P1 XNP ’s N1“Jim is guided/protected by Kim.”

result-type idiom

Distinguishing between idioms S/N 1-6 and S/N 7-11 revealed two senses of “get” amongst theseidioms. The WordNet sense of get in the result-type idioms S/N 1-6 is “S: (v) get, acquire (come into
the possession of something concrete or abstract)” while that for have is “S: (v) have, have got, hold(have or possess, either in a concrete or an abstract sense)”. Comparatively, that of get and have in
idioms S/N 7-9 is “S: (v) get, let, have (cause to move; cause to be in a certain position or condition)”.
This is aligned with the analysis of a change in possession or motion.
Additionally, at the beginning of this section, idioms with give were said to result in their get or
have counterparts. The only exception found in this study is the idiom give someone the shirt of one’s
back “to give anything and everything that one possesses”, which had no result-type alternation. This
could be due to the focus of the figurative meaning, in that it describes the character of the agent as
being generous, rather than an action per se. Consequently, it has no result-type alternation.
Regardless, it is interesting to note that the possessive idioms exhibit syntactic behaviour which
is characteristic of typical English sentences. Particularly, the change in possession or movement
expressed in cause-type idioms allow for the derivation of their result-type alternation. Additionally,
two senses of get exist, depending on whether the verb suggests a change in possession or movement.
This analysis could be applied to a wider group of idioms in future.

19

6.1.2

Prepositional phrasal idioms

Contrary to the initial definition of possessive idioms as “verb-phrase (VP) prototypical idioms” (Section ??), the results demonstrated the opposite, in that some idioms could have their verbs omitted andbe headed by a preposition, and still convey the same figurative meaning.
Table 4 specifies the idioms with omissible verbs. Specifically, S/N 1-6 have their verbs replacedwith the preposition with. According to Farrell (2009), with carries a locative, togetherness sense andhas four related senses which are instantiations or metaphorical extensions of this central having-sense
meaning. Farrell mentioned that the verb have in clauses which convey togetherness relationships,
could be replaced by the preposition with and still retain the same meaning.
Table 4
List of PP-VP idioms
S/N1

Prepositional phrase idiom
with one’s back against/to the wall

Verb phrase idiom
have one’s back against/to the wall2

with one’s head in the clouds

have one’s head in the clouds3

with one’s nose to the grindstone

keep one’s nose to the grindstone4

with one’s heart in one’s mouth/throat

have one’s heart in one’s mouth/throat

5with something under one’s belt

have something under one’s belt

6

with one/both hands tied behind one’s backdo something with one/both hands tied behind
one’s back7

by the skin of one’s teeth

do something by the skin of one’s teeth

8in one’s heart of hearts

know/believe in one’s heart of hearts

Similarly, in the idioms in Table 4, the verb, which is typically have, conveys some locative senseand having relationship. Thus, it can be replaced by with, which expresses a togetherness sense, andhence changes from a VP to a PP idiom. This finding demonstrates that possessive idioms are notsyntactically frozen, and instead exhibit aspects of the English grammar in terms of a transformationfrom a VP to PP, as illustrated in (19) and (20). One interesting aspect is the movement of the idiom
from sentence-medial to sentence-initial position to retain its grammaticality and meaning. Besides,
the preposition could even be omitted ((19c) and (20c) without affecting the idiomatic meaning.
(19) a. Kim had her back against the wall as she faced the strong competition.
b. With her back against the wall, Kim faced strong competition.
c. Kim’s back was against the wall as she faced the strong competition.
(20) a. Kim had her heart in her mouth when she watched the tennis match.
b. With her heart in her mouth, Kim watched the tennis match.
c. Kim’s heart was in her mouth when she watched the tennis match.

20

6.1.3

Transformation in idioms

Table 5 illustrates transformation in terms of passivisation, which is another interesting aspect ofpossessive idioms.
One concern during analysis was whether these idioms were worth mentioning. As mentioned in
Section 3, this thesis views some idiomatic expressions as decomposable. Consequently, they shouldhave some syntactic flexibility and undergo syntactic processes such as modification, quantification,
topicalization, ellipsis and anaphora (Nunberg et al., 1994). Thus, the question was whether the idioms
listed in Table 5 were a result of syntactic flexibility due to decomposability or whether they wereseparate lexical entries.
A further examination revealed that only idioms S/N 3-5 were decomposable. Moreover, the fiveidioms only appear in restricted syntactic structures, namely those listed in Table 5. To illustrate, theidiom burn one’s fingers never ever appears in the form “one’s fingers are burnt” as opposed to seal
one’s lips which can appear as keep one’s lips sealed or one’s lips are sealed. Thus, these passivised
forms should be recognized as individual idiomatic entries, and not as syntactic variations of eachother.
Table 5
Transformation in Idioms

6.2

S/N
1

Basic
burn one’s fingers

Passivised
get one’s fingers burnt2

cross one’s fingers

keep/have/got/with one’s fingers crossed
fingers crossed (functions like an adverb)

3

dirty one’s hands

get one’s hands dirty

4

set one’s heart on something

have one’s heart set on something
one’s heart is set on something

5

seal one’s lips

keep one’s lips sealed
one’s lips are sealed

Decomposability

Table 6 illustrates the frequency of decomposable and nondecomposable idioms, whereby the former
encompasses the three groups of idioms detailed in Section 5, namely the non-projected, partiallyprojected and fully projected idioms, while the latter refers to the non-projectable idioms. The numberof decomposable idioms remained stable at around one-third of the total number of idioms, regardlessof whether they were co-indexed or separate possessive.
Similarly, in the randomized sample (Table 7), there were fewer decomposable idioms (41.1%)
than nondecomposable (58.9%) ones. Furthermore, idioms were found in all four categories of projection (Table 7). This demonstrates that idiom decomposability is not a strict dichotomy, and is insteada matter of degree.

21
Table 6Frequency of Decomposable and Nondecomposable Idioms
Decomposable Nondecomposable
Co-indexed possessive idioms
Separate possessive idioms
Total number of idioms

159 (37.8%)
32 (34.4%)
191 (37.2%)

262 (62.2%)
61 (65.6%)
323 (62.8%)

Total
421
93
514

Table 7
Decomposability Scale of Idiom Sample
Decomposable
Non-projected Partially Projected
Frequency
Total frequency

8 (8.4%)19 (20.1%)
39 (41.1%)

Nondecomposable
Fully Projected

Non-projectable

12 (12.6%)

56 (58.9%)
56 (58.9%)

Refer to Table 13 in Appendix A for a more precise listing of the 95 idioms along the decomposability scale.

Comparing the three categories – normally decomposable, abnormally decomposable and nondecomposable (Nunberg, 1978; Gibbs et al., 1989a) – with the four groups presented in this thesis –non-projected, partially projected, fully projected and non-projectable, I would like to argue for thelatter categorization over the former.
In Section 2, it was mentioned that a component in a normally decomposable idiom is used literally, such as save in save your skin, while some constituents in an abnormally decomposable idiom
are used metaphorically, such as buck in pass the buck. However, this categorization is inadequate
since constituents in a normally decomposable idiom can also be used metaphorically. For instance,
skin in save your skin does not literally refer to the natural body covering of an individual, but refers to
the individual himself, to convey the meaning “protect oneself from danger or difficulty”. Similarly,
some parts of an abnormally decomposable idiom could be used literally. For example, while buckin pass the buck is used metaphorically, pass is used literally. Therefore, categorizing decomposable idioms into normally and abnormally decomposable ones is inadequate in capturing the range ofdecomposable idioms.
In contrast, referring to Table 132 , the projection terms are better at reflecting the decomposability
spectrum. Specifically, non-projected idioms have components which combine and map directly fromthe literal to the figurative meaning, such as live beyond one’s means. Contrarily, in partially projectedidioms, some components retain their literal meaning while others are metaphorically extended or
mapped onto a synonym. In harden one’s heart, harden retains its meaning “to make hard or harder”,
while heart is metaphorically extended to “feeling”. In fully projected idioms, each of their main
lexical components refers to a metaphorical relationship between itself and its referent. For instancein button up one’s lip, the act of buttoning can be metaphorically understood to mean “restraining
2

Refer to Appendix A.

22something”; while lip is symbolic of “speech” since it is involved in the act of speaking. Finally, nonprojectable (nondecomposable) idioms do not have separate meaningful units which combine together
to form the idiomatic meaning, for example shake the dust off one’s feet “to leave angrily or rudely”.
Therefore, the categorization proposed in this thesis is more appropriate than that posited by Nunberg(1978) and Gibbs et al. (1989a) since the former clearly demonstrates idiom decomposability, in termsof how constituents contribute to the figurative meaning.
Table 7 shows that amongst the three categories of decomposable idioms, there are fewer nonprojected idioms – only eight as opposed to nineteen partially projected idioms and twelve fully projected ones. This suggests that an understanding of idioms require some general knowledge or experience to be aware of the relation – whether concrete, abstract or metaphorical – between the individual
parts and their figurative referents (Gibbs et al., 1989b: 65).
There is also a relative high percentage of nondecomposable (or non-projectable) idioms in both theinitial frequency data (Table 6) and randomized sample (Table 7). This could be due to the particulargroup of idioms being analysed in this thesis, in other words, possessive idioms. To reiterate, idioms
vary widely both syntactically and semantically. Thus, it is possible that most possessive idioms are
more nondecomposable, unlike Gibbs et al.’s (1989a) results which revealed that approximately 60%
were decomposable idioms (comprised roughly 30% normally decomposable and 30% abnormallydecomposable idioms). A criticism to Gibbs et al.’s findings was that the idioms were chosen according to the three groups – normally decomposable, abnormally decomposable and nondecomposable.
This resulted in a uniform distribution amongst the groups and reduced result validity (Abel, 2003).
Moreover, a study of 171 idioms chosen randomly from the Longman Dictionary of English Idioms
revealed that native English speakers assessed 41.9% as decomposable and 58.1% as nondecomposable (Titone & Connine, 1994). Therefore, it is possible that the higher number of nondecomposable
idioms found in this thesis is representative of possessive idioms, and perhaps representative of idioms
in general, as exemplified by Titone and Connine’s (1994) study.
Furthermore, the higher frequency of nondecomposable idioms could be due in part to their semantic variation (Table 8), whereby each variant is expressed as a separate lexicon entry, so as toincorporate it into the ERG and WordNet. This finding is contrary to the traditional approach, which
views idioms as fully frozen semantic units. It is also not aligned with how the compositional approach
treats nondecomposable idioms, in that they are syntactically inflexible (Gibbs et al., 1989a; Nunberg
et al., 1994) and lexically inflexible (Gibbs et al., 1989b). Rather, Table 8 shows that there exist
nondecomposable idioms which exhibit semantic flexibility in their verbs or nouns, while retaining
their figurative meanings. This suggests that language use is a creative process and nondecomposable
idioms would still be understood when they are used in an adequate pragmatic context (Gibbs et al.,1989b: 66).
Therefore, the decomposability of possessive idioms ranges over a scale, from non-projected topartially projected to fully projected and lastly, non-projectable, with the majority in this study belonging to the last group. One important finding was that nondecomposable idioms are not entirely
frozen as claimed by proponents of both the noncompositional and compositional approach. Rather,
they can exhibit semantic flexibility. This permits a new understanding of idioms in general, whereby

23

nondecomposable idioms notwithstanding, some of them are actually semantically flexible.
Table 8Semantic Flexibility in Nondecomposable Idioms
Nondecomposable idiom

Figurative meaning

get one’s knickers in a knot/twist

to become very upset about something, that is
usually unimportant

blow/ sound/ toot one’s own trumpet/ hornto brag

off one’s head/ nut/ rocker/ trolley

to be crazyhave one’s heart in one’s mouth/ throat

to be frightened or anxious

hold/ keep/ play one’s cards close to one’s to be secretive and not reveal one’s thoughts orchest/ vestplans
put/ set one’s house in orderto improve one’s behavior or correct one’s faults

too big for one’s boots/ breeches/ britches

to behave as if one is more important or cleverthan one really is

have/ keep one’s wits about one

to remain alert and be prepared

6.3

Plausibility

In Section 3, it was hypothesized that a more decomposable idiom would also be more plausible.
Results are shown in Table 9, whereby the label “decomposable idioms” includes the non-projected,
partially projected and fully projected idioms. Results indicated that contrary to the hypothesis, there
was little correlation between idiom decomposability and plausibility. Most possessive idioms wereplausible (71.6%), regardless of their decomposability. Since the majority of both decomposability
types can have a literally plausible reading, this suggests that decomposability and plausibility havelittle relationship.
Table 9Decomposability and Plausibility Matrix
Plausible

Implausible

Decomposable Nondecomposable

Decomposable

Nondecomposable

16 (16.8%)

11 (11.6%)

23 (24.2%)

45 (47.4%)

Refer to Table 14 in Appendix B for a more detailed matrix of these 95 idioms.

Titone and Connine (1994) revealed that literality correlated negatively with abnormal decomposability and vice versa. However, the interrelation was very low and thus regarded as insignificant. In
comparison, a study demonstrated that abnormally decomposable idioms were comprehended fasterthan normally decomposable idioms (Gibbs et al., 1989; cited in Burt, 1992: 601). This could be due

24

to literal agreement between verbs and their objects in most abnormally decomposable idioms which
is absent in normally decomposable idioms (Burt, 1992: 601). This particular interaction between
figurative and literal meanings was termed as transparency, and which was likewise supported byAbel (2003: 344).
A preliminary study was thus conducted on the sample to examine a possible association between decomposability and transparency. However, most decomposable and non-decomposable idioms were judged to be transparent, thus indicating little relationship between these two dimensions.
Moreover, transparency was more difficult to reliably judge than plausibility. Henceforth, no further
analysis was conducted for the separate possessive idioms and neither plausibility nor transparency
was considered to correlate with the decomposability of possessive idioms.

6.4

Further semantic analysis

The following subsections examine the semantics of possessive idioms, which was made possible
through the creation of idiom entries and the subsequent parsing through the BNC.
6.4.1

Integration into WordNet

To recap, this thesis aimed to provide an insight into the semantic behaviour of possessive idioms.
To do so, not only was a definition provided for each idiom, the senses for each component, theirsynonyms (for decomposable idioms) and paraphrases were also selected from WordNet.
Particularly, the linking of paraphrases to WordNet is one meaningful contribution to improving
NLP applications and machine translation. Idioms are commonly found and yet are not well documented in dictionaries. This includes WordNet, which has about 120,000 word forms lexicalisingroughly 100,000 concepts, but still do not include many idiomatic VPs (Fellbaum, 1998b). Fellbaum(1998b) argued that VP idioms cannot be automatically integrated into WordNet due to several formal
and semantic problems and offered suggestions to address these problems.
The first is a formal problem whereby the syntactic forms of idioms do not agree with those in
WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998b: 54). Such idioms include VPs preceded by negation, such as cannot
believe one’s eyes, and idioms with two VPs joined together by a conjunction, like pick up one’s
marbles and go home. However, if such idioms are frozen, they would disallow any internal variation
or modification, and could thus be incorporated into WordNet when they are synonymous with existing
entries.
Another problem is the discontinuity in the fixed parts of many VP idioms (Fellbaum, 1998b: 54),
particularly possessive idioms, whereby the genitive slot can be filled by any possessive adjective ornoun, thus resulting in discontinuous constituents. This could be resolved by including a rule witha preprocessor that would allow the genitive slot to be filled with either a pronoun or a noun fromWordNet.
The third problem is related to the conceptual-semantic quality of idioms. These idioms convey
concepts which cannot be added into WordNet either as independent entries or members of current
synsets, due to an absence of lexicalized WordNet concepts to which they can be associated. Examples

25

include cook someone’s goose and drown one’s sorrows whose particular meaning might be lost if they
were linked to more general WordNet concepts. This could be resolved if idioms were decomposable
which would allow their constituents to be assigned meanings that are already lexicalised in WordNet(Fellbaum, 1998b: 55).
Lastly, idioms which have a VP form but convey states are also problematic. Their figurative
meanings are defined as be/ become adjective, such as flip one’s lid “to be angry” and hold one’s
tongue “to be quiet”. WordNet separates verbs from adjectives since they convey different concepts.
Moreover, copula-verbs can combine with many adjectives and is thus pointless for WordNet to list
all combinations. Hence, such VP idioms are not integrated into WordNet. Fellbaum (1998b: 56) proposed using troponymy, which is the “manner relation that organizes the verb lexicon”, to incorporate
figurative meanings as subordinates of copula-verbs without altering lexicon structure.
The methodology in this thesis targets the aforementioned four problems. Specifically, the syntactic templates and id_rel and poss_rel markers resolve the first two problems. By relating the necessarycomponents of an idiom together, NLP systems would recognise constituents as a whole, such as foridioms with negation and conjunction. Moreover, they resolve the discontinuity problem since noun
variables can be filled with any pronoun or noun and simultaneously agree with the genitive slot.
To represent idioms in WordNet without losing their specific meaning, Fellbaum suggested applying the decomposability concept. This thesis addresses this by creating idiom entries which examinedthe decomposability of idioms. Where idioms were deemed decomposable, the lexical and figurative
meanings of their constituents were chosen carefully from WordNet. This extensive database would
thus aid in the representation of decomposable idioms into WordNet.
To integrate VP idioms whose figurative meanings express states, Fellbaum proposed to use a
troponymy relation. However, this thesis suggests adopting a hypernymy/hyponymy relation, suchthat idioms are linked as lexicalised entries to adjectives. To illustrate, Fellbaum suggested that holdone’s tongue “be quiet” should be listed as a subordinate of the copula-verb be to mean “to be quiet
is to be in some manner”. Instead, this thesis proposes to lexicalise hold one’s tongue by adding it as
an entry linked to the adjective quiet in a hypernymy relation, whereby the idiom is a hyponym of theadjective.
There are several advantages for doing so. Firstly, the hypernym functions as the baseline of theidiomatic expression. By expressing the idiom in a straightforward manner, the idiom becomes moreaccessible, thus benefitting dictionary users, especially non-native speakers. Moreover, a hypernymy
relation would expose dictionary users to various hyponyms, which constitute different ways of expressing a lexical item, in this case, the adjective quiet.
Secondly, a hypernymy approach would reduce the amount of work, in that fewer entries are
required for the incorporation of idioms. Instead of proceeding from the verb be to its troponym
relation be quiet and finally to the idiom hold one’s tongue, the proposed approach would go directlyfrom the adjective quiet to the idiom itself.
Furthermore, the states conveyed in the figurative meanings can be expressed using various verbadjective combinations, rather than a strict one-to-one pairing. For instance, find one’s feet “to become
confident in a new situation as one gains experience”, conveys “become confident”, which can also

26

appear as “get confident”, “grow confident”, “come to be confident”, among others. Should the troponymy solution be applied, subordinates for all possible copula-verb have to be listed, which makes
the WordNet integration process tedious and unnecessary. Contrarily, relating idioms with adjectives
through a relation of hypernymy would be more efficient.
6.4.2

Semantic variation in the BNC

To recapitulate, a depth command was applied to idioms in the XNP V1 XNP ’s N1 category to generatevariants which contained verbs and nouns one level down the WordNet hyponymy relation (Section 5).
The original idioms and their variants were then run through the BNC in two preliminary studies
to determine the kind and frequency of idioms in the current corpus, so as to better understand thesemantic and syntactic flexibility of possessive idioms.
The first study involved two idioms bite one’s tongue and (w)rack one’s brains. Table 10 showsthat not all the sentences with the two idioms were parsed from the BNC. This was due to parser
limitation in that long sentences were simply ignored during parsing. Furthermore, for the parsed
sentences, idiom identification was approximately 70% accurate because of how the ERG functions.
For instance, the parser did not recognise someone bit their tongue as an example of bite one’s tongue
because the ERG considers the androgynous singular pronoun someone to be in disagreement withthe plural pronoun their.
Table 10First Preliminary Study
BNC sentences

Parsed sentences

Sentences with idioms

20
62

17
49

15 (75%)38 (61.3%)

bite one’s tongue(w)rack one’s brains

The percentages in Sentences with idioms were calculated as a percentage of BNC sentences.

The second study involved parsing about 100,000 sentences, of which 319 sentences (0.03%)
contained idioms and variants. The low percentage could be attributed to several reasons. Besides
the aforementioned parser and grammar limitation, it is possible that the current genres of spoken andwritten samples in the BNC have relatively few possessive idioms. Another reason was that manyother possessive idioms were overlooked since only idioms belonging to one syntactic template were
examined.
Table 11
Second Preliminary Study
i-yes
Total

i-no

Token count251 (76.7%) 68 (21.3%)319

i-yes denotes parsed sentences that truly include idioms
while i-no denotes sentences that were wrongly parsed ashaving idioms.

27

Regardless, the 319 sentences can be considered a lower bound, whereby if the possessive idiomsin the other syntactic templates were included, the number is expected to perhaps double. Moreover,a manual check through the 319 idioms showed that 76.7% were correctly parsed as idioms (i-yes),
as shown in Table 11. The relatively high percentage clearly validates our methodology, in terms of
the semantic and syntactic descriptions of idioms. This allowed idioms to be incorporated into the
ERG and subsequently constructed such that the BNC could identify idioms and their variants. An
exception was the expression earn one’s way, which was generated as a variant of the idiom get one’s
way. However, a manual check revealed that this phrase should be a variant of earn one’s keep. Thus,
the methodology of churning out variants still require some fine-tuning, in order to obtain the mostaccurate results.
Among the 319 parsed idioms, few were of the variants generated from the idioms with the XNP
V1 X’s N1 structure, which suggests little semantic flexibility. Conversely, Section 6.2 illustrated
that some nondecomposable idioms exhibited semantic flexibility in their verbs or nouns (Table 8).
Likewise, semantic flexibility was found in decomposable idioms as illustrated in Table 12. The
findings thus seem to be in contradiction. However, it can still be concluded that possessive idioms
are semantically flexible, except that the lexical substitution is relatively restricted, depending on
aspects such as the context and verb characteristics, like telicity and verb-noun compatibility.
Table 12Semantic Flexibility in Decomposable Idioms
Nondecomposable idiom

Figurative meaningcollect/ gather one’s thoughts/ wits

to become mentally composed, especially after astate of distress; or to become mentally composed
in preparation for a speech

drop/ lower one’s guard

to reduce one’s level of vigilance or caution to
avoid danger or difficultybare/ open/ pour out one’s heart to someone

to reveal one’s deepest thoughts and feelings tosomeonecast/ throw in one’s lot with someone

to associate oneself with and share the fate of aperson or group, no matter the outcome

be a thorn in someone’s flesh/ side

to be a constant source of annoyance or problem
to someone

put oneself in someone’s place/ shoes

to improve one’s behavior or correct one’s faults

too big for one’s boots/ breeches/ britches

to imagine being someone else and understand asituation from his/her point of view

The second study also revealed a high frequency of the idiom shake one’s head (approximately20%), which was often literally and figuratively used together. The relatively high percentage ispartly because roughly half of the sentences containing this idiom were found in a particular literarytext. This demonstrates how genres can affect the kind of idiom; in this case, shake one’s head is very

28

common in literary genres. Since the BNC contains information about genres, such as medicine, sports
and literature, future work could examine the relationship between genres and idiom frequency. This
would in turn inform English-language learners of what idioms they have to understand, dependingon their area of interest.
Moreover, considering that current dictionaries do not list idiom frequency, a corpus-based studyof idiom frequency is important not just for enhancing dictionaries, but also for improving translation
systems by informing NLP programmers what idioms to focus on. For this to happen, future work
can continue from this preliminary study and work on the other syntactic templates identified in thisthesis.
Lastly, though the focus of the BNC findings was on semantic flexibility, some syntactic flexibility
was observed. This was manifested as modifications using adjectives such as cannot believe my own
bloody eyes, make one’s unsteady way and have one’s humorous moment. This is an area worth
investigating by running a larger idiom sample through the corpus to examine other aspects of theirsyntactic flexibility, such as quantification and topicalization as claimed by Nunberg et al. (1994).

7

Future Work

A comprehensive semantic and syntactic description of possessive idioms was created in this dissertation, within which, syntactic templates with higher frequencies were incorporated into the ERG.
Future work should involve adding the other syntactic templates into the ERG to have a more inclusive
idiom database.
The methodology also involved choosing the most appropriate WordNet sense and linking themto the literal, figurative and paraphrase senses in the idiom entries. Therefore, the entries can be used
to integrate idioms into WordNet, via decomposability and hypernymy as discussed in Section 6.4.1.
This could improve NLP applications that make use of WordNet as their lexical database. Idiom
entries could also be used to develop automatic paraphrasing.
Evidently, the work accomplished in this thesis can be applied to a broader goal, in terms of representing idioms in the grammar and lexicon, so as to enhance NLP systems. Researchers could futherinvestigate alternations in other idiom types, and also the relationship between genres and idiom types.
All these would help to shed light on the behaviour of idioms, a group of MWE that has long posed achallenge to researchers.

8

Conclusion

This thesis emerged from my URECA project (2014) and Sameha’s (2012) FYP in that the former
focused on the decomposability of possessive idioms while the latter examined the implementationof such idioms into the grammar. However, both projects were neither thorough enough in the examination of the syntactic and semantic behaviour of possessive idioms, nor in the discussion of their
inclusion into the grammar and lexicon.
Thus, this thesis set out with three aims (refer to Section 3): first, to provide a detailed semantic

29

and syntactic description of the possessive idioms with the broader aim of incorporating them into the
ERG and WordNet; second, to evaluate their decomposability; third, to examine the relation between
decomposability and plausibility.
Regarding the first objective, I have clearly produced an extensive description of the 514 possessive idioms through the creation of the idiom entries – a major contribution to the study of idioms.3 These were used in the subsequent methodology and analyses. Subsequently, with the helpof Flickinger and Bond, the higher frequency co-indexed possessive idioms were added into the ERG
then automatically constructed and compiled. In terms of incorporating them into WordNet, the linking of the literal senses, paraphrases and synonyms to WordNet helped in two aspects; one being
the running of the idioms through the BNC to search for variants, and two being the relative ease ofaccommodating the idioms into WordNet in future.
I also examined the syntactic and semantic behaviour of possessive idioms, something which I
deemed as incomplete in earlier research. The syntactic aspects include alternation and transformationin possessive idioms and the possibility of PP idioms. Semantic analysis revealed that in integrating thepossessive idioms into WordNet, a hyponymy relation would be more appropriate than a troponymy
relation. Some syntactic and semantic flexibility were also found from the idiom entries and BNC
output.
This thesis proposed to use the projectability concept to better capture the degree of decomposability. Results also illustrated that there were more nondecomposable than decomposable idioms,
in both the co-indexed and separate possession idioms. Furthermore, unlike past research, analysis
showed that some nondecomposable idioms do undergo semantic variation.
Lastly, there appears to be little correlation between decomposability and plausibility, as opposedto the hypothesis (Section 3). Similarly, no relationship was found between decomposability andtransparency. Thus, although these three dimensions affect idiom comprehension, they do not appear
to interact meaningfully.
The findings exemplify that possessive idioms have a rich syntax and semantics. Evidently, thisthesis is one step closer towards the ultimate aim of incorporating idioms into the English grammar andlexicon. Having laid down an extensive groundwork for future NLP research, hopefully less people
will lose their mind when it comes to machine translation and second language learning.

3

The idiom entries of the 514 idiom would be made available online through the Creative Commons BY 3.0 SG.

30

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10

Appendix A

This table illustrates the decomposability scale of the randomized sample of 95 co-indexed possessive
idioms, which is analyzed and referenced in section 6.2.
Table 13
Decomposability Scale of Randomized Sample4
Non-projected

Partially Projected

Fully Projected

Non-projectable

XNP V1 X’s N1
harden one’s heartfeather one’s nest

lose one’s buttons

press one’s luck
gird one’s loins

XNP V1 X’s N1 [P1 YNP ]lose one’s hold on/overbare one’s soul to some-

get

one’s

someone/thingone

something

toes

into

keep one’s eye on something
set one’s mind on someone/thing
XNP V1 [P1 X’s N1 ]live beyond one’s means

button up one’s lip

laugh up one’s sleeve
rest on one’s oars
sit on one’s hand

XNP V1 X’s N1 [P1 D1 N1 ]have one’s ear to theget one’s ducks in a row

groundhave one’s back against
the wallget one knickers in a knot
throw one’s toys out ofthe pramContinued on next page

4

Some of the idioms are listed in their basic forms without a verb since they can appear with several verbs. An example
is a dose of one’s own medicine in XNP V1 D1 N1 [P1 X’s N2 ] which can appear as get a dose of one’s own medicine, receivea dose of one’s own medicine or need a dose of one’s own medicine.

35

Table 13 – Continued from previous page
Non-projected

Partially Projected

Fully Projected

Unprojectable

XNP V1 X’s N1 P1bawl one’s eyes out

keep one’s chin up

cry one’s heart out

keep one’s head down
stick one’s neck out

XNP V1 X’s own N1
mind one’s own businessbe one’s own person
cut one’s own throat
sound one’s own trumpet
toot one’s own horn

XNP V1 +P1 X’s N1
let down one’s guard

dig in one’s heels
pull up one’s socks
put up one’s feetstick in one’s oars

XNP be [P1 X’s N1 ]out of one’s headout of one’s depth

on one’s last legs
off one’s rocker
off one’s trolley

XNP V1 X’s N1 [P1 X’s N2 ]have one’s heart in one’s
boots
have one’s heart in one’s
mouthknow one’s arse fromone’s elbow
put one’s foot in one’s
mouthscratch one’s ear with
one’s elbow
XNP V1 X’s N1 A1keep one’s eyes open
keep one’s nose clean

get one’s hand dirty

put one’s house in order
set one’s house in order
Continued on next page36

Table 13 – Continued from previous page
Non-projected

Partially Projected

Fully Projected

Unprojectablea dose of one’s own

a run for one’s money

shake the dust off one’s

medicine(sense 2)

feet

XNP V1 D1 N1 [P1 X’s N2 ]a legend in one’s own

the monkey off one’s(life)timebacka legend in one’s own
mind
XNP V1 YNP [P1 X’s N1 ]have something up one’s
sleevehave something under
one’s belt
keep something under
one’s hat
under one’s thumbwrap someone around
one’s finger
XNP V1 X’s N(est)
do one’s best
do one’s worst
try one’s best
try one’s damnedest
try one’s worst
XNP V1 [P1 X’s N1 [P2 YNP ]]throw in one’s lot withlook down one’s nose atsomeonesomeone/thingtake off one’s hat tosomeoneturn up one’s nose atsomeone/thing
up to one’s eyes insomethingContinued on next page37

Table 13 – Continued from previous page
Non-projected

Partially Projected

Fully Projectedcannot get one’s headcannot believe one’s ears

around someone/thingcannot believe one’s eyes

Unprojectable

XNP aux+neg V1 X’s N1cannot keep one’s eyes
off someone/thing
not mince one’s words
XNP V1 YNP D1 N1 [PP P1 X’s N2 ]the rough edge of one’s

give someone a piece of

tongueone’s mind

the rough side of one’s

give someone the shirt off

tongueone’s back

XNP V1 R1 A1 [P1 X’s N1 ]too big for one’s breeches
too big for one’s britches
too big for one’s boots
XNP V1 [P1 D1 N1 P2 X’s N2 ]by the skin of one’s teeth
fly by the seat of one’spants
XNP V1 N1 [P1 X’s N2 ]have bags under one’seye
have eggs on one’s face
XNP V1 X’s N1 [P1 X]
have one’s wits about one
keep one’s wits about one
XNP V1 X’s N1 and V2 N2have one’s cake and eat it
toopick up one’s marbles
and go home
Continued on next page38

Table 13 – Continued from previous page
Non-projected

Partially Projected

Fully Projected

Unprojectable

Remainder
at the top of one’s game

put all one’s eggs in one

have one’s heart set on

basketsomething
let one’s emotions show
let someone/thing slip
through one’s fingers
Total
8 (8.4%)19 (20.1%)

12 (12.6%)

56 (58.9%)

39

11

Appendix B

This table illustrates the decomposability and plausibility matrix of the randomized sample of 95 co-indexed
possessive idioms. This table is explained and referenced in section 6.3.

Table 14
Decomposability and Plausibility Matrix of Randomized Sample5
Plausible
Decomposable

Implausible
Nondecomposable

Decomposable

Nondecomposablefeather one’s nest

harden one’s heartpress one’s luck

XNP V1 X’s N1lose one’s buttons

gird one’s loins
XNP V1 X’s N1 [P1 YNP ]lose one’s hold on/over

get one’s toes into some-bare one’s soul to some-

something

thing

one
keep one’s eye on something
set one’s mind on someone/thing

XNP V1 [P1 X’s N1 ]live beyond one’s means

laugh up one’s sleeve

button up one’s lips

rest on one’s oars
sit on one’s hand
XNP V1 X’s N1 [P1 D1 N1 ]have one’s ear to theget one’s ducks in a row

groundget one knickers in a knot
have one’s back against
the wallthrow one’s toys out ofthe pram

XNP V1 X’s N1 P1bawl one’s eyes out

keep one’s chin up

cry one’s heart out

keep one’s head down
stick one’s neck out
Continued on next page

5

Some of the idioms are listed in their basic forms without the verb since they can appear with several verbs. An
example is a dose of one’s own medicine in XNP V1 D1 N1 [P1 X’s N2 ] which can appear as get a dose of one’s own
medicine, receive a dose of one’s own medicine or need a dose of one’s own medicine.

40

Table 14 – Continued from previous page
Plausible
Decomposable

Implausible
Nondecomposable

Decomposable

Nondecomposable

off one’s rocker

out of one’s depth

on one’s last legs

off one’s trolley

out of one’s head

XNP V1 X’s own N1
mind one’s own businessbe one’s own person
cut one’s own throat
sound one’s own trumpet
toot one’s own horn

XNP V1 +P1 X’s N1
let down one’s guard

dig in one’s heels
pull up one’s socks
put up one’s feetstick in one’s oars

XNP be [P1 X’s N1 ]XNP V1 X’s N1 [P1 X’s N2 ]know one’s arse fromhave one’s heart in one’s

one’s elbow

boots

put one’s foot in one’s

have one’s heart in one’s

mouth

mouth

scratch one’s ear with
one’s elbow
XNP V1 D1 N1 [P1 X’s N2 ]a dose of one’s own

shake the dust off one’s

medicinefeet

a legend in one’s own(life)timea legend in one’s own
mind
a run for one’s money(sense 2)
Continued on next page

41

Table 14 – Continued from previous page
Plausible
Decomposable

Implausible
Nondecomposable

Decomposable

Nondecomposable

XNP V1 X’s N1 A1
get one’s hand dirty

put one’s house in order

keep one’s eyes open

set one’s house in order

keep one’s nose clean
XNP V1 YNP [P1 X’s N1 ]have something up one’s

wrap someone aroundsleeveone’s finger

have something under
one’s belt
keep something under
one’s hat
under one’s thumb
XNP V1 X’s N(est)
do one’s best
do one’s worst
try one’s best
try one’s damnedest
try one’s worst
XNP V1 [P1 X’s N1 [P2 YNP ]]look down one’s nose atthrow in one’s lot withsomeone/thing

someonetake off one’s hat to

up to one’s eyes in some-

someonething

turn up one’s nose atsomeone/thing
XNP aux+neg V1 X’s N1cannot believe one’s ears
cannot believe one’s eyescannot get one’s headaround someone/thingcannot keep one’s eyes
off someone/thing
not mince one’s words
Continued on next page

42

Table 14 – Continued from previous page
Plausible

Implausible

Decomposable

Nondecomposable

Decomposable

Nondecomposable

give someone the shirt off

the rough edge of one’s

give someone a piece of

one’s backtongueone’s mind

XNP V1 YNP D1 N1 [P1 X’s N2 ]the rough side of one’s
tongueXNP V1 R1 A1 [P1 X’s N1 ]too big for one’s breeches
too big for one’s britches
too big for one’s boots
XNP V1 [P1 D1 N1 []P2 X’s N2 ]]by the skin of one’s teeth
fly by the seat of one’spants
XNP V1 N1 [P1 X’s N2 ]have bags under one’seye
have eggs on one’s face
XNP V1 X’s N1 [P1 X]
have one’s wits about one
keep one’s wits about one
XNP V1 X’s N1 and V2 N2pick up one’s marbles

have one’s cake and eat it

and go hometooRemainder
at the top of one’s game

put all one’s eggs in one

have one’s heart set on

let one’s emotions showbasketsomethinglet someone/thing slip
through one’s fingers
Total
23 (62.5%)

45 (80%)16 (37.5%)

11 (20%)