Analyse sur corpus d’expressions figées verbales de l’allemand.

Idioms are traditionally considered to be more or less fixed expressions, and limited variation is often admitted only on the basis of introspection. We report on a study of German verb phrase idioms based on a one billion word corpus. An extensive analysis of several hundred idioms and thousands of tokens reveals a surprising range of lexical, syntactic and morphological variation and shows that idioms are subject to the same grammatical rules as the literal language. A typical example is discussed in detail. Finally, we focus on a relatively neglected category, the determiner, and investigate its use in German verb phrase idioms. German definite articles can contract with many prepositions to form a single constituent. Lexical resources show citation forms of a number of idioms with the contracted form as a fixed component. But corpus data show that decontraction occurs in many idioms, both as a free variation and as a secondary effect of lexical variation, such as the insertion of adjectives between the proposition and the determiner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]