Objective Frequency Values of Canonical and Syntactically Modified Idioms: Preliminary Normative Data
Authors: Azzurra Mancuso, Alessandro Laudanna (Università di Salerno, 2019)
Topic: Lexical and Semantic Resources and Analysis

Abstract
In this study we collected several objective frequency values for 124 Italian idiomatic expressions, in order to verify the relation among these measures of frequency and a set of subjective variables (e.g., familiarity, meaning knowledge, age of acquisition, etc.) which are relevant from a psycholinguistic perspective, since they are supposed to play a role in idiom processing. Specifically, we calculated the following frequency types: occurrences of content words, (lemma and word-form values), occurrences of canonical idioms (e.g., Paolo broke the ice), occurrences of syntactically manipulated idioms (e.g., The ice was suddenly broken by Paolo). We discuss the results of correlational analyses.

Introduction
Several psycholinguistic norms are available for pictures and words (e.g., AUTHOR; AUTHOR; JAUTHOR; AUTHOR). However, this is less frequent for longer word-combinations, such as idiomatic expressions. An idiomatic expression comprises several words whose overall figurative meaning is not a direct function of its components AUTHOR. For instance, the Italian idiomatic expression rompere il ghiaccio (“break the ice”) means “to take the initiative in an embarrassing situation” and thus its global meaning is far from the meaning of its components. Some norms are available in English (AUTHOR; AUTHOR; AUTHOR; TAUTHOR), in French (AUTHOR; AUTHOR), in Bulgarian (AUTHOR), in German (AUTHOR) and in Italian (AUTHOR). These databases collect mean values obtained from subjective ratings for some relevant psycholinguistic variables (such as age of acquisition, familiarity, meaning knowledge, etc.). The existence of norms for idiomatic expressions has made it possible to account for issues concerning the comprehension, the production and the lexical storage of idioms (e.g., AUTHOR; AUTHOR; AUTHOR). There are different theories on the topic of how idioms are stored in memory. According to some authors, idioms correspond to lexical units (e.g., AUTHOR), whereas for others, they are stored as configurations of words AUTHOR. As claimed by AUTHOR, “it is therefore obvious that no empirical test of the different views of idiom processing is possible without first collecting norms for idioms”.

Conclusion
In the present study, we pursued the main goal of collecting objective frequency values of idioms and evaluating their relation with a set of subjective variables available for Italian idiomatic AUTHOR. The novelty of our methodology allowed us to obtain corpus-based frequency values not only for content-words composing idioms (as reported in other normative data available for other languages, e.g., AUTHOR; AUTHOR; AUTHOR), but also for idioms considered in their entirety. Furthermore, frequency values took into account also the occurrences of syntactically manipulated idioms (passive form, left dislocation, etc.). The possibility of having objective frequency values of idiomatic expression can be an important support for directing future research on idiom processing. Recent psycholinguistic studies (e..g, AUTHOR) have questioned the hypothesis that the so-called 'idiom superiority effect' namely, the established fact that idiomatic expressions are faster to process than literal sentences -is due to the idiomaticity itself of the expressions. According to the authors, the phenomenon could depend, more simply, on the fact that the idiomatic expressions adopted in most of the existing experimental studies were much more familiar than the literal sentences of control to which they were compared, which, in many cases, were completely new expressions, obtained by manipulating in part the idiomatic expressions of origin. A possible continuation of these studies could involve the implementation of experiments, in which idiomatic and literal expressions are matched for the objective frequency of occurrence, as well as a series of other well-known parameters. Moreover, studies aiming to explore the syntactic behavior of idioms might rely on objective frequency values of idioms occurring in a non-canonical form and explore the type and the percentage of manipulations for each idiomatic expression.