Fixed Expression

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A Fixed Expression is a Compound Word that is fixed and takes on a specific meaning.



References

2018

2005

a. spill the beans, shoot the breeze (idiom)

b. the eye of a needle, the evening falls (metaphor)

c. dogs bark, sound asleep(collocation)

d. make progress, take a bath(support verb construction)

e. Don’t count your chicks before they hatch, Curiosity killed the cat(proverb, saying)

f. The X-er, the Y-er e.g. The more, the merrier (construction)

g. to cost an arm and a leg, listen like a police officer(simile)

h. at school, by and large(institutionalized phrase or set phrase)

Some of these expressions are by no means fixed sequences of words, thus researchers adopted other terms like multi-word units, multi-word lexemes, multi-word expressions (Sag et al., 2001), phrasal lexical items (Everaert and Kuiper, 1996) or phrasal lexical entries (Sailer, 2000).

A satisfactory definition of fixed expression is difficult due to the varied and idiosyncratic nature of the data. Aiming at a definition of fixed expression to be adopted by lexicographers, Everaert (1993) proposed the following:

‘A combination of two or more words that must at least satisfy the (a) condition and perhaps, but not necessarily, condition (b) and/or (c):

(a) the word combination is fixed;
(b) the combination as a whole has a non-compositional or partially compositional meaning;
(c) the syntactic/morphological behavior of the fixed expression 1.1. Background 3 and/or its parts is not to be expected given the syntactic/morphologic behavior of the individual words or the combination as a whole (Everaert, 1993, pg. 18).’

1998

1992

1984