Ramón Martí Solano

The current world economic crisis: phraseological equivalents and variants in English, Spanish and French

The 2007 world economic crisis has given rise to a specific phraseology which is common to several European languages and which functions at different syntactic and pragmatic levels depending on the language. We claim that solely specifically designed corpora for each multiword unit can yield empirical results for contrastive phraseology. This paper explores total and partial phraseological equivalents in English, Spanish and French and mainly focuses on the string the bubble bursts, its variants and its loan translations. Our main hypothesis is that it is a high degree of lexicalisation of the nominal constituent of some predicate phraseological units that allows the wide-ranging scope of lexico-syntactic variation of the canonical forms.

Introduction

The current world economic crisis started in 2007 in the United States and was largely the result of financial and real estate speculation. The crisis rapidly spread to many other countries and just one year later it developed into a worldwide phenomenon. The enormous amount of texts produced principally in the media was unquestionably characterised by a common phraseology. Economic crises lend themselves to the use of metaphors, imagery and figurative language which are not only pervasive and recurring but which are also shared by a considerable amount of languages and are definitely motivated by "intertextual phenomena" (Dobrovol'skij & Piirainen, 2006: 34).

Contrastive phraseology

Having as a general background the research done by Dobrovol'skij and Piirainen on contrastive phraseology, we subscribe to the concept of cross-linguistic uniformity of idioms in European languages (Piirainen, 2005: 45). Three different types of sources of total or partial phraseological equivalents must be taken into consideration when describing and analysing such a phenomenon, namely loan translations, common metaphorical source domains and common cultural tradition. Table 1 presents a selection of idioms from the same thematic group shared by the three languages in question. Although they may look like full or absolute equivalents at a first glance, a detailed corpus analysis shows that their syntactic, pragmatic and collocational behaviour differs from one language to another. These partial equivalents are "idioms of L1 and L2 which have identical or near-identical meanings, but do not fully correspond in syntactic and lexical structure, or imagery basis." (Dobrovol'skij, 2000: 372). Many other idiomatic expressions related to this topic have obviously been encountered during the course of this study. Expressions such as a sinking ship, go belly up or go to the wall are simply very scarcely represented or not represented at all in the English corpus and for that reason they have not been considered for inclusion1 . The same situation applies to the equivalent expressions in French and in Spanish.

Corpora and research methodology

Given the prevalence of this type of phraseology in the written press, we decided to use corpora coming from newspaper articles from the British daily The Guardian, the Spanish newspaper El País and the Belgian daily Le Soir. For searching the corpora we have used Concgram 1.0., a programme recently developed by Chris Greaves for the automatic identification of phraseological variation. This programme allows to "identify all the cooccurrences of two or more words irrespective of constituency and/or positional variation in order to more fully account for phraseologial variation and provide the raw data for identifying lexical items and other forms of phraseology." (Greaves, 2009: 2). This piece of research is therefore a corpus-based analysis of the main and relevant lexical and grammatical associations of a sub-group of multi-word units related to this topic and their co-occurrence patterns.

The English corpus

The research started with the creation of a corpus of English texts by using the filters provided by the electronic archives of The Guardian. The idea was to have a very specific corpus spanning a period of one year 2 , limited to the business section of the newspaper and using the lemma BUBBLE as the target word. The result is a corpus of over 130,000 words specifically designed to analyse the string the bubble bursts (its canonical form, the potential variants and the main collocations of the nominal constituent) in business and financial contexts. By doing so it was easy to avoid possible occurrences of other related but semantically different bigrams such as burst someone's bubble, which is defined in the Oxford Dictionary of Idioms as follows: "shatter someone's illusions about something or destroy their sense of wellbeing". The latter is rather infrequent and tends to be used in fiction whereas the former is extremely frequent and appears mainly in newspapers, according to a search carried out in the British National Corpus 3 .

The Spanish corpus

The same criteria were used for the other two corpora. For the Spanish corpus, exactly the same filters were applied. The lemma BURBUJA was used to create a corpus of over 130,000 words, limited to the business section of the newspaper and for the same period of time. Here are the results which are, by the way, strikingly similar both quantitatively and qualitatively showing practically no frequency differences across both languages (Colson, 2008: 198): 3 There are only 4 occurrences of shatter one's bubble compared to 23 occurrences of the bubble bursts, 15 of which are to be found in the newspaper/magazine section of the corpus.

The French corpus

Unfortunately articles cannot be accessed in the electronic archives of the main French national newspapers Le Monde and Le Figaro, which would have provided a similar corpus to the English and Spanish ones. The national Belgian newspaper Le Soir has been used instead to create the French corpus. As the amount of articles was substantially and comparatively low, the time span was widened to the years 2008 and 2009 and a text database was created of about half the size of the other two databases totalling approximately 65,000 words. The lemma BULLE was used as the target word to search for strong patterns and the analysis of lexical collocations. The interlinguistical comparison of the results of the three corpora (Tables 2, 3 and4) shows a striking homogenization of the use of the same multi-word unit. The number of lemmas is similar in both the English and the Spanish corpus (221 and 196 respectively), whereas it is much higher in the French corpus (a total of 144) if we consider the fact that the latter is half the size of the other two. The property/housing bubble and the dotcom bubble are the two main collocations to be found in the three corpora, which accounts for the standardisation of these co-occurrences across languages.

The lexicalisation of the nominal constituent bubble/burbuja/bulle

Some nominal constituents become lexicalised and are used independently from the string to which they formerly belonged. Our main hypothesis is that it is a high degree of lexicalisation of the nominal constituent of some predicate phraseological units that allows the wide-ranging scope of lexico-syntactic variation of the so-called canonical forms, at least in English. According to the Oxford English Dictionary in its 1989 edition, bubble is defined as "Anything fragile, unsubstantial, empty, or worthless; a deceptive show. From the 17th c. onwards the term is often applied to delusive commercial or financial schemes, such as the Mississippi bubble or the South Sea bubble 4 ." The word thus came to mean a kind of financial hoax at that early stage to gradually approach the sense, as is the case today, of the word boom, a period of sudden economic growth. This is clearly not the case with the other two languages. As far as Spanish is concerned, the word burbuja is registered in the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española with only one figurative sense as illustrated by the only example supplied in the dictionary entry "Los poderosos viven en una burbuja de impunidad", which literally translates as "People in power live in a bubble of impunity". However, the comprehensive Diccionario de uso del español by María Moliner in its 2008 edition registers the loan translation with the same meaning as it has in English although this new sense was not still registered in, for instance, the 2000 edition of the same dictionary. So we are to infer that the word must have been used in Spanish with this new sense some time between these two dates. The only seven examples of burbuja inmobiliaria (property bubble) found in the CREA 5 are all from newspaper sources and are attested in the years 2002, 2003 and 2004, which definitely corroborates the lexicographic hypothesis.

As for French, the situation is similar to that in Spanish. The Trésor de la Langue Française informatisé does not register any figurative sense of the word except for its use as a constituent of the rather infrequent expression coincer la bulle meaning to rest or to be idle. It is not until 2001 that the first occurrence of bulle immobilière can be found in the archives of the French national newspaper Le Monde in an article published on 16 January of that year in the business section entitled "L'euro reprend des forces avant l'échéance historique du 1 er janvier 2002" to be precise. The new sense can be found, however, in the French dictionary Le Petit Robert in its 2007 edition, which clearly shows a parallel lexicographic pattern similar to its Spanish counterpart.

Phraseological variants

The commonest and most obvious variant on the phrase the bubble bursts is, needless to say, the substitution of the verbal constituent. First of all, synonymous verbs show differences not only in focus or degree but also in register, which, by and large, accounts for a great deal of phraseological variation. The change of polarity is, in its turn, achieved by the use of alternating verbs such as grow, develop, expand or inflate. But what is most interesting is the use of bubble as the agent of a transitive verb as shown in (1) with the verb to funnel, which clearly shows an extremely high degree of syntactic complexity connected to the nominal constituent:

4 Mississippi Bubble: a financial scheme in 18 th -century France that triggered a speculative frenzy and ended in financial collapse. The scheme was engineered by John Law, a Scottish adventurer, economic theorist, and financial wizard who was a friend of the regent, the Duke d'Orléans. South Sea Bubble: the speculation mania that ruined many British investors in 1720. The bubble, or hoax, centred on the fortunes of the South Sea Company, founded in 1711 to trade (mainly in Slaves) with Spanish America, on the assumption that the War of the Spanish Succession, then drawing to a close, would end with a treaty permitting such trade. 5 CREA stands for Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual, a synchronic corpus for Spanish of over 154,000,000 words.

(1) There was nothing resembling an investment boom until the dot-com bubble at the end of the decade funnelled vast sums of capital into crazy internet schemes. (The Guardian, 12/11/2008) The range of verb variants is certainly narrower in the other two languages: estallar, reventar, hincharse, romperse, formarse and desinflar are the only six verbs used in Spanish with various degrees of frequency6 . The same thing applies to related or unrelated nouns such as estallido, pinchazo, reventón, explosión, formación and generación. As regards French, the variation is even smaller: éclater, exploser, péter and dégonfler and their corresponding nouns éclatement, explosion, pet and dégonflement represent the limited number of variants on the canonical form of the string. The most recurrent collocations of bubble/burbuja/bulle both as the nominal constituents of the idiom and as independent lexicalised words coincide in the three languages. However, two special collocations seem to be specific to Spanish if compared to the other two: burbuja educativa (educational bubble) and burbuja del ladrillo (the brick bubble, a metonymic realisation of burbuja inmobiliaria, the housing bubble, a variant form which denotes a more informal language register). The overall results show across-the-board similarities between the three languages concerning this idiom although minor culture-specific and language-specific variants reveal interesting pragmatic or contextual adaptations.

To tighten one's belt

To tighten one's belt is another idiom that has been widely used, but definitely not as much as the bubble bursts, and which belongs to the common stock of European phraseology. Here are just a few examples of equivalents in other European languages: Spanish apretarse el cinturón, French se serrer la ceinture, German den Gürtel enger schnallen, Italian tirare la cinghia, Portuguese apertar o cinto or Greek σφίγγω το ζωνάρι. Nominalisation and adjectivisation of predicate phraseological units are extremely common in English unlike in Spanish or in French which show major grammatical constraints and, thus, normally tend to express the same sense by other linguistic means. Trail-blazing from blaze a trail, whistleblowing from blow the whistle or sabre-rattling from rattle your sabre are but a few examples of this common practice. Examples (2) and (3) show the nominal forms of the idiom in the English corpus. No equivalent forms have been found either in the Spanish or in the French corpus.

(2) Britain's consumers lost the spending habit last month as a combination of indifferent spring weather and belt-tightening to combat the recession kept them out of the shops. (The Guardian, 18/06/2009)

(3) The biggest US carmaker, General Motors, is implementing belt-tightening measures ranging from the factory floor to the boardroom as it scrambles to bolster its cash position by $15bn (£7.5bn) to cope with plummeting car sales. (The Guardian, 16/07/2008)

To klll the goose that lays the golden eggs

This idiom, which originated in one of Aesop's Fables and was later readapted in France by La Fontaine, and which exemplifies the common cultural and literary tradition of European languages, is the least used of the four selected in English whereas it seems to be favoured in the other two languages as found in the archives of the three newspapers. The idiom, which can be paraphrased as "Greed destroys the source of good", is illustrated in (4) by the use of a variant form in the Spanish corpus:

(4) Y justo ahora, cuando la burbuja ha estallado, cuando se han acabado las ganancias multimillonarias, cuando la gallina de los huevos de oro está muerta y enterrada, qué casualidad. (El País, 31/05/2009) The above variant could be translated as "when the golden-egg goose is dead and buried". It should be noticed that it is used co-textually with la burbuja ha estallado ("the bubble has burst") and is inserted in the same syntactic frame, namely a temporal subordinate clause introduced by cuando ("when") as a sort of stylistic reiteration. The fact that no occurrences have been found in the English corpus and just one occurrence in the Spanish corpus and one in the French corpus clearly calls for the creation of specific corpora in order to empirically give evidence of across-language phraseological comparisons.

Green shoots

A very recent idiom in English and an even more recent loan shift in the other two languages, green shoots can somehow epitomise what can be referred as 'mass media intertextuality'. The original metaphor is associated to the renewal of life in deciduous trees in the spring. The conceptual correspondence works well in the three languages but the novelty of the phrase in Spanish and in French often makes necessary the addition of metalinguistic extensions of the type 'as they say', 'what's been called', etc.

(5) A pesar de los brotes verdes que dicen ver algunos, el Fondo Monetario Internacional (FMI) aseguró ayer que Europa no doblará la esquina de la crisis hasta la segunda mitad de 2010.7 (El País, 13/05/2009) Example (5) from the Spanish corpus illustrates the inclusion in the same contextual environment of another loan shift from English to turn the corner ("doblará la esquina" in bold type in the text), which, not having the same metaphoric entailment in Spanish, loses part of its idiomaticity for the sake of clarity by the addition of the phrase "de la crisis" (of the crisis).

Conclusion

Special corpora need to be designed in order to address specific research questions. When observed in the light of these corpora, across-language phraseological equivalents show relevant association patterns which can be extremely similar from a quantitative and a qualitative point of view. Concerning the multi-word unit the bubble bursts and its Spanish and French equivalents, English shows a higher degree of verb variation which evidences what Gläser defines as phraseo-stylistics [START_REF] Gläser | A plea for phraseo-stylistics[END_REF]. The processes of nominalisation and adjectivisation of the "belt-tightening" type seem to be particular to English. Parallel corpora in other languages would shed some light on the extent of this phraseological specificity. Although phraseological equivalents tend to share a common syntactic, pragmatic and collocational behaviour, minor culture-specific variants appear. Finally, whether some of the loan shifts will eventually become institutionalised and widespread in French and Spanish only time and meticulous research work will tell.

Table 1 .

 1 Common phraseological units from the same thematic group, i.e. economic crisis

	_________________________________________________________________
	English	Spanish	French
	_________________________________________________________________
	the bubble bursts	estalla la burbuja	la bulle éclate
	tighten your belt	apretarse el cinturón	se serrer la ceinture
	kill the goose that	matar la gallina de	tuer la poule aux
	lays the golden eggs	los huevos de oro	oeufs d'or
	green shoots	brotes verdes	pousses vertes
	__________________________________________________________________

Table 2 .

 2 Results of the English corpus the bubble bursts

	__________________________________________________________
	Categories	Examples	N° of tokens
	__________________________________________________________
	lemma	bubble	221
	bigram	bubble burst	49
	collocations	housing bubble	34
		property bubble	17
		dotcom bubble	11
	__________________________________________________________

Table 3 .

 3 Results of the Spanish corpus estalla la burbuja

	__________________________________________________________
	Categories	Examples	N° of tokens
	__________________________________________________________
	lemma	burbuja	196
	bigram	estalla burbuja	47
	collocations	burbuja inmobiliaria	55
		burbuja de la vivienda	4
		burbuja de Internet	3
		burbuja de las puntocom	1
	__________________________________________________________

Table 4 .

 4 Results of the French corpus la bulle éclate

	__________________________________________________________
	Categories	Examples	N° of tokens
	__________________________________________________________
	lemma	bulle	114
	bigram	bulle éclate	53
	collocations	bulle immobilière	28
		bulle internet	22
		bulle monétaire	5
	___________________________________________________________

There are no occurrences of a sinking ship in our corpus. There is only one occurrence of go belly up and two occurrences of go to the wall.

For practical reasons we chose what has been described as the highest peak of the crisis, a period somewhere between the summers of 2008 and 2009.

The English corpus yields a total of 18 different verb variants, namely burst,prick, puncture, pop, explode, implode, blow up, go pop, create, grow, develop, expand, deflate, inflate, fuel, funnel, collapse, pump up.

"Despite the green shoots that some people say they can see, the International Monetary Fund announced yesterday that Europe will not turn the corner until the second half of 2010." (our own translation).


Martí Ramón

Solano

VARIATION PATTERNS AND CREATIVITY IN ENGLISH NON-COMPOSITIONAL BINOMIALS

Keywords: binomials, non-compositionality, adjectivisation, collocational frameworks, hapax legomena, prosodic factors

Binomials, as all other types of phraseological units in English, are more or less fixed and therefore subject to a certain degree of variation. Noncompositional binomials are usually varied by replacing one of the constituent parts by another lexeme which changes the mental representation of the metaphor involved. Prosodic devices are responsible as well for the creation and variation of non-compositional binomials. However, we claim that the lexicalisation of certain binomials is the result of their functioning autonomously in discourse outside their traditional collocational frameworks. Well-established nominal or verbal binomials can thus attain a higher degree of non-compositionality thanks to their discoursal instantiations as attributive adjectives. It should be noted that conceptual blending accounts mainly for the creation of nonce formations, purely for stylistic purposes.

RESUMÉ

Comme avec tous les autres types d'unités phraséologiques en anglais, les groupes binaires sont plus ou moins figés et par conséquent susceptibles de subir un certain degré de variation. Les groupes binaires noncompositionnels sont généralement variés en remplaçant l'un de leurs éléments constituants par un autre lexème qui change la représentation mentale de la métaphore sous-jacente. Des facteurs prosodiques sont aussi responsables de la création et de la variation des groupes binaires noncompositionnels. Néanmoins, nous estimons que la lexicalisation de certains groupes binaires est le résultat de leur fonctionnement autonome en dehors de leurs cadres collocationnels traditionnels. Des groupes binaires nominaux ou verbaux peuvent ainsi atteindre un plus haut niveau de noncompositionnalité grâce à leurs emplois discursifs en tant qu'adjectifs épithètes. Il s'avère important de souligner que le télescopage conceptuel donne lieu principalement à la création d'hapax legomena, purement pour des raisons stylistiques.

VARIATION AND INSTABILITY OF PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS: THE CASE OF BINOMIALS

Phraseological units (PhUs) encompass all polylexematic items of a language that are more or less lexically and morpho-syntactically fixed and that range from the totally transparent to the most opaque. Contrary to the traditional view of PhUs as fixed in form and lexis, recent research demonstrates that they are subject to wide-ranging variation and that instability and creativity are an intrinsic part of these multi-word units [START_REF] Moon | Fixed Expressions and Idioms in English: A Corpus-Based Approach[END_REF][START_REF] Langlotz | Idiomatic Creativity: A Cognitive-linguistic Model of Idiom-representation and Idiom-variation in English[END_REF]Fellbaum 2007;[START_REF] Vega Moreno | Creativiy and Convention. The Pragmatics of Everyday Figurative Speech[END_REF].

Binomials, or irreversible binomials, are a subtype of PhUs rather frequent in English (Hudson 1998: 32) and traditionally defined as "two words pertaining to the same form class, placed on an identical level of syntactic hierarchy, and ordinarily connected by some kind of lexical link" (Malkiel 1959: 113). These are usually coordinated lexical items from all word classes, principally nouns, adjectives, and verbs, which are syntactically frozen, albeit to a certain degree, and whose meaning can be either compositional or non-compositional. Strawberries and cream and father and son are compositional nominal binomials whereas fair and square is a non-compositional adjectival binomial and slash-and-burn, a non-compositional verbal binomial generally functioning as an attributive adjective. By a process of semantic extension or metaphorisation many compositional binomials can become non-compositional as with bread and butter or milk and water. These conjoined pairs tend to belong to the same word class and are normally linked by the conjunction and. However, some scholars have included strings such as head over heels (Norrick 1988: 72;Gramley & Pätzold 2004: 58), from cradle to grave (Moon 1998: 154) or even happy go lucky (Makkai 1972: 314) in their own and rather extensive classifications.

Although binomials are less likely to vary if compared to predicate idioms or other idiomatic verbal phrases, the results of our research show that "language use combines creativity and convention" (Vega Moreno 2007: 217) and that the discoursal behaviour of binomials is far more different, complex and unusual than what dictionaries generally register as canonical forms or lexicalised variants.

DEGREES OF NON-COMPOSITIONALITY

It is generally assumed that there is a cline or continuum of idiomaticity or non-compositionality in multi-word units that would go "from least to most idiomatic based on semantic consideration" (Grant & Bauer 2004: 42). The classical example of noncompositionality amongst idioms in English is represented by the binomial by and large (Glucksberg 2003: 72)

VARIATION PATTERNS

The daily press appears to be the ideal environment for the creation and variation of phraseological units in general and for binomials in particular. Even though these fixed coordinated lexemes are generally used in their canonical form, examples of discoursal instantiations are not infrequent and although some of them may be considered as nonce formations, others are recurrent and may eventually become lexicalised.

Word-for-word substitution

As with idioms in general, the most widely extended pattern of variation is the substitution of one of the constituents of the string by another word of the same class, more often than not a synonym. Other types of lexical relations are also possible as illustrated by the following examples: get your wires crossed > get your lines crossed (parasynonymy) wrap yourself in the flag > drape yourself in the flag (hyponymy) from head to foot > from head to toe (meronymy) The examples above are lexicalised variants, extensively institutionalised and registered as such by general dictionaries and dictionaries of idioms. As far as binomials are concerned, the commonest variation pattern consists in the substitution of the second core element of the string as in (1) in which the non-compositional dyad body and soul (with its literary variant heart and soul) becomes body and mind with exactly the same holistic meaning:

(1) The more sushi you taste the more sushi you know and the more you become curious about sushi and your knowledge and enjoyment grows [sic], and you become obsessed in body and mind about sushi. (The Guardian, 30 January 2005) Other substitution patterns can generate paradigms of noncompositional binomials lexically, syntactically, and semantically related: the binomial template blood + and + N has given rise to strings such as blood and guts (violence and bloodshed, especially in fiction), blood and thunder (unrestrained and violent action or behaviour, especially in sport or fiction) and blood and iron (military force rather than diplomacy). This binary phraseological template (templates such as heart + and + N or body + and + N in which the first noun is invariable and the second changes paradigmatically) is thus productive and can, by a process of lexical analogy, bring about new formations such as blood and treasure:

(2) They work for us and, when they chose to make war on Iraq, it was our blood and treasure they were risking. Of course we have a right to know why they did it. (The Guardian, 3 March 2004) The indivisible character of the string in example (2) is confirmed by its syntactic behaviour: the binomial functions as the direct object of the verb risk with which it collocates, which is not generally the case for either nominal component taken separately. The noncompositional status of this binomial is also determined by a lexical constraint which does not allow other nouns to replace either of the constituent parts for the holistic meaning to be retained.

Intensification

An important number of lexicalised binomials in English are what has been described as composés synonymiques coordonnées (Tournier 1991: 90) or "coordinated word-pairs with semantic repetition" (Kopaczyk 2009: 91) as, for example, aims and objectives, rules and regulations, decline and decay or guts and determination. This type of expressive lexical combination constitutes a pattern of semantic relation used not for the sake of precision, as in legal terminology, but as a stylistic device for the sake of emphasis or intensification:

(3) Alastair, whose grandmother is mortally ill in Liverpool, has no words for his grief at the trespass behind him, but possesses the heart and marrow to feel it. (The Guardian, 26 February 2005) In (3) the second nominal constituent has been added in order to intensify the meaning expressed by the canonical form (not) have the heart to do something. Exactly the same meaning could have been construed by simply using the first nominal component.

Autonomy from collocational frameworks and syntactic constraints

Some binomials are considered restricted collocations in the sense that they can only be used with a specific verb. This is the case of life and limb, normally used as the argument of the verb risk in the lexicalised idiomatic phrase risk life and limb. This binomial can exceptionally collocate with other synonymous or antonymous verbs such as, respectively, jeopardise or save. The verb form may even be substituted by a synonymous noun phrase forming a collocational framework (Renouf & Sinclair 1991: 128-129) as in a + N + to + binomial, where N is usually instantiated by the noun threat. Searches in the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) show that this binomial is not used independently or otherwise stated free from its collocational constraints. The same can be applied to other collocational frameworks of the type preposition + binomial, as, for instance, from far and wide. The question remains whether these binomials actually have a discoursal behaviour independent from the constraints of their collocational frameworks. Corpus research shows that their lexicographical description does not always reveal the actual realisations of the phrases in discourse: only 17, out of a total of 97 occurrences of far and wide in the BNC are in fact preceded by the preposition from.

A further step towards a higher degree of non-compositionality is represented by the attributive use of some binomial pairs which have both collocational and syntactic constraints. The binomial in (4), which is normally realised as part of the larger frame to be head and shoulders above somebody or something, functions independently as an attributive adjective with the distinct unitary meaning of "unsurpassed":

(4) The head and shoulders winner at this year's awards was the Royal Court theatre -it dominated the shortlists with 11 nominations and … (The Guardian, 23 November 2009) Examples ( 5) and ( 6) show combinations which may have a lesser degree of non-compositionality in other discoursal and syntactic contexts but that increase their non-compositionality by the fact of being used attributively:

(5) But there remains a much greater probability of blood-andthunder contests in the lunchtime derby in Hull, and later at the Jungle where Castleford meet Wakefield tomorrow night. (The Guardian, 9 April 2009) (6) Now, how do we get round it? Swell party funds direct and we've got a declaration problem. Push a £1.5m loan note across the table, though, and we're in nodding and winking business. (The Guardian, 13 March 2006) The creation of new binomials or the variation on the wellestablished and lexicalised ones is usually the consequence of prosodic devices coming into play. Alliteration, intrinsic to the English language, is at the origin of non-compositional sequences as illustrated in the examples below:

(7) The hip-and-happening Observer has hung its panel from a Christmas tree: highly desirable, perhaps, but naff all the same. (The Guardian, 30 November 2004) (8) Up it inexorably goes, carrying the happy hamsters, far above the grunts and grinds of the town. (The Guardian, 28 February 2005) In ( 8) the transparent binomial grunts and groans is lexically and conceptually associated with the non-compositional dyad grunts and grinds which stands here for the hustle and bustle of city life. In (9) the use of the string gun and gang is based on paronymy and on the metonymical relation between the nominal constituents.

(9) His intervention comes as figures close to Gordon Brown criticised Downing Street for not responding more quickly or coherently to David Cameron's promises of tax breaks for married couples or to his argument that absent fathers are to blame for gun and gang culture. (The Observer, 25 February 2007) This string, which tends to collocate with the nouns culture, crime, and violence, has no occurrences in the BNC and only one in the COCA. There are 28 results in the archives of The Guardian: 22 of them from the years 2007 and 2008. The Telegraph lists a total of 13 article results, the first registered example dating from 2004, which demonstrates the recent use of this binomial.

Blending

Some idiom variants have been analysed as the result of speakers having "blended two different standardised metaphorical uses" (Vega Moreno 2007: 210-211) and consequently creating a new variant form sharing the meaning of two distinct but semantically related multiword units. The binomial in ( 10) is the product of the blending of the non idiomatic collocation to put up the bunting and the idiomatic expression to roll out the red carpet. Both strings are semantically related as they belong to the same conceptual domain: OFFERING A SPECIAL TREATMENT. The resulting blend is not simply the combination of the nominal constituents but also of the two phrasal verbs to roll out and to put up. The example in ( 11) is the result of the blending of the nonidiomatic verbal phrase to take up pen and the idiomatic expression to take up the cudgel(s) for something or somebody.

(12) ... are all moving towards the same ends, which is the virtual end of the small independent shops that are the glue and lifeblood of our communities and … (The Guardian, 31 January 2007)

From the expression to be the lifeblood of something and the figurative use of the word glue as something that binds people or a society together, the formation in (12) shows the high degree of transparency achieved by the combination of two lexical items for the creation of a new binomial.

(13) This unflappable demeanour surprises me. I had expected something altogether more hellfire-and-brimstone, given that she comes from the Ramsay school of expletive-laden kitchen machismo, where a light branding with a red-hot grill pan is par for the course. (The Observer, 16 December 2007) The canonical form which corresponds to the string in ( 13) is the binomial fire and brimstone. This variant form is the result of a conceptual blending with another multi-word unit hellfire and damnation which shares the same meaning with the afore-mentioned idiomatic expression.

CONCLUSIONS

Although irreversible binomials tend not to vary as much as other idiomatic phrases do, they show, nevertheless, a certain degree of variation which follows several regular patterns. They can be varied by replacing one of their constituent parts, generally the second core element, by another lexeme. A higher degree of non-compositionality is achieved by the fact of well-established binomials functioning syntactically as another word class, usually as attributive adjectives. This further step towards non-compositionality underlines the close and fundamental relation between syntax and semantic compositionality.

( 10 )

 10 Meanwhile, I must ready my homecoming banquet, put out the bunting and red carpet. The coach is pulling up.(The Times, 18 October 2008)

  (11) A Rake's Progress, a Harlot's Progress, Marriage à la Mode… you can see Steve Bell taking up pen and cudgel in exactly the same causes now.(The Guardian, 5 March 2007)

  which could be placed at the top of the cline. Rough and ready, good and proper, seek-andhide, huff and puff, trial and error or airs and graces are but a few

	examples	of	binomials	showing	different	degrees	of
	transparency/opacity and non-compositionality.

Mots-clés: groupes binaires, non-compositionnalité, adjectivisation, cadres collocationnels, hapax legomena, facteurs prosodiques.


Ramón Martí Solano
email: ramon.marti-solano@unilim.fr

Phraseological units in English: variation through lexical insertion

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

Phraseological units and variation

The term phraseological unit (henceforth PhU) is an umbrella term that encompasses all multi-word units of the language whose meaning is not compositional, i.e. not retrieved or decoded as the addition of the meanings of each of their constituent parts. The canonical form of PhUs, also known as citation form, is purely a lexicographic convention even though lexicographers differ sometimes slightly, other times hugely, about the form multi-word units must take when recorded in dictionaries. Mainly for this reason we suggest, in its stead, the use of the term "lexicographic form". The corpus, a selection of articles from the on-line versions of The Guardian and The Observer of nearly 8 million tokens, represents a clear-cut chunk of written English from the quality press in the UK from 2003 to 2007. The results of the retrieval of all types of transformations, idiom variants and exploitations have been systematically contrasted with potential occurrences in the British National Corpus (BNC) and in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) in order to account for institutionalisation, lexicalisation, ad hoc transformations, contextualisation and levels of creativity. Corpus evidence shows that the forms of PhUs are not as fixed as dictionaries, for obvious reasons, are bound to record.

All of the characteristics traditionally applied to PhUs can be questioned if we take into account, as fundamental notions, the inherent variability and instability of these forms and the tension between stability and creativity. Apart from items such as take place and at all which stand at the highest level of fixedness 1 and are therefore never varied (Moon 1998:120), full idioms, mainly verbal and nominal phrases, are more often than not varied or exploited.

Hence, the importance of considering variation as one of the main building blocks of linguistic description:

It is often pointed out that so-called 'fixed phrases' are not in fact fixed; there are very few invariable phrases in English. Nevertheless, in discussions, descriptions, and the teaching of languages, the myth of fixedness is perpetuated-as if variation was a minor detail that could safely be ignored. (Sinclair 2004:30) Variation is thus intrinsic to any natural language: it is through variation that language change takes place and some forms or uses supersede others diachronically. In the realm of phraseology, multi-word units can be varied morphologically, syntactically, semantically and pragmatically. Recurrent and systematic variation may result in PhUs having their entry forms altered in general dictionaries and dictionaries of idioms. The insertion of an adjective may eventually become so common and widespread that certain PhUs can be considered as having an open slot in their lexicographic form, as is the case with cut your teeth which is recorded by the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary (CALD) as Cut your political/professional, etc. teeth and defined as 'to get your first experience of the type mentioned'. The definition itself represents a clear sign of the semantic openness of this string which is normally instantiated with the insertion of a qualifying adjective that specifies and restricts its sphere of application delimiting its referential scope. Some lexicographers 2 opt, in cases like this, for a solution such as 'Cut one's _____________ teeth'. In respect to this string, the Collins Cobuild Dictionary of Idioms (CCDI) includes the following information in the body of the entry 'This expression can be varied by adding an adjective before 'teeth'', which reveals to what extent lexicographers are aware of phraseological variation and how much they take into account its recurrence for matters of lemmatisation, as well as for lexicographic definitions and linguistic description. The phrase in italics in example (1) is illustrative of the fact that variation on idiomatic expressions through adjective insertion can be a fundamental linguistic issue:

(1) Her parents disapproved of subversive forms like rhythm & blues or rock'n'rollthey also forbade their four children from going to the cinema -so Doris cut her musical teeth by singing in her father's church choir. (The Guardian, February 20

2004)

Cut one's _____________ teeth is increasingly instantiated with a domain delimiter 3 such as political, which happens to be the only example of an inserted adjective for this PhU shared by the BNC and the COCA. The number of occurrences of this open-slot PhU is only 4 in the British corpus and 46 in the American corpus. The range of adjectives goes from professional or legal to cinematic, theological or golfing. Other expressions such as cast an eye over sth or keep / have an eye on sth have, through lexical insertion, given way to new lexicalised forms that have their own entries in dictionaries of idioms: cast a critical / professional, etc. eye over, keep a weather eye on, keep an eagle eye on and have a beady eye on are all recorded in the Longman Idioms Dictionary (LID).

Types of phraseological variation

Five distinct types of variation on PhUs can be outlined: lexical substitution, lexical insertion, truncation, grammatical transformation and transcategorisation. Lexical substitution is the most frequent and widespread type of variation on PhUs. It is usually found in predicate phrases, schematised as VP + NP, in which either the verbal constituent or the nominal constituent (or sometimes both) is replaced by another item of the same word class with which it can bear different kinds of semantic relation. Examples such as shed / weep crocodile tears or right up your alley / street show how well-established, widespread and straightforward this type of variation is. Alternative lexical realisations do not change the holistic meaning of the unit nor do they add new semantic information or restrict its application to a certain domain but they can modify the mental scenario of the metaphor involved. Lexical insertion constitutes the second most important means of variation on PhUs.

We will be dealing with this type of variation in depth and in detail further down this paper.

Other minor types of variation are truncation, in which part of the original unit is elided as in scrape (the bottom of) the barrel or a weak link (in the chain) and grammatical transformation, which stands for a minor part of phraseological variants and does not normally attain lexicalised status. It should be noticed that not all PhUs can be varied from a grammatical or syntactic point of view. The classical and rather hackneyed example kick the bucket cannot be passivised as, for instance, *the bucket was kicked. We have found some examples of pluralisation, as in keep a straight face > keep straight faces where the nominal constituent changes according to a plural subject. Finally, transcategorisation, also known as word-class transforms, allows certain PhUs to be transformed into units of a different word-class in order to adapt to the constraints of specific syntactic contexts. One of the commonest means of achieving this adaptation is represented by adjectivisation by which, as in example [START_REF]The Longman Idioms Dictionary (LID) and the Oxford Dictionary of Idioms (ODI) are especially keen on this lexicographic technique with plenty of headphrases lemmatised as follows: _____'s-eye view[END_REF], a prepositional phrase with an adverbial function (off the top of one's head) becomes an adjective:

(2) There is nothing top-of-the-head about what Mr Hain has to say either; his pamphlet is the product of extensive online consultation and several focus-group discussions. (The Guardian, March 11 2004)

The semantic analysability of phraseological units

PhUs have traditionally been regarded as fixed and non-compositional and their constituent parts as non-analysable. More recent phraseological research has shown that there is a cline of fixedness and that therefore there are multi-word units which are more fixed than others. Most idioms are definitely not lexically frozen if we understand this concept as total frozenness since "at least 90% of V-NP idioms, including many usually regarded as completely frozen, appear to allow some form of (syntactically) internal modification" (Nicolas 1995:233) and are regularly lexically modified either through substitution or insertion, or both. Syntactic flexibility, lexical substitution and lexical insertion in PhUs can be explained if we consider that these units are not simply long words but that their constituents have a meaning of their own (Glucksberg 2003:69). This characteristic, a sort of semantic autonomy assigned to the core constituent(s) of multi-word units, has been identified as the analysability of idioms (Langacker 1987:448;Gibbs 1995:98-99;Langlotz 2006a:28;Stathi 2007:82). The compositional view of idiom representation regards them as having a "motivated semantic structure" and states that "this structure influences their syntactic and lexical flexibility" (Langlotz 2006a:15).

Semantic prosody and variational collocates

Words that currently collocate with other words end up establishing associations which are generally positive or negative: this extra semantic value constitutes their "semantic prosody". Hunston (1995: 137) summarises the notion of semantic prosody thus: "Briefly, a word may be said to have a particular semantic prosody if it can be shown to co-occur typically with other words that belong to a particular semantic set." (Hunston & Francis 2000:104) Extraneous adjectives co-occurring with the nominal constituents of predicate PhUs make up a regular paradigm of what we have termed "variational collocates". Let us consider the following example of variation on a PhU through the insertion of an adjective:

(3) He had an idiosyncratic ear for orchestral colour, a classical composer's ability to create long, through-composed pieces from a handful of motifs and a jazz bandleader's ability to write for specific personalities. (The Guardian, March 4 2004)

The term "variational collocates" refers to the paradigm of adjectives that collocate inside the PhU with the main nominal constituent. The adjective idiosyncratic is normally associated with nouns such as way, approach, style, factors, behaviour, character, interpretation, features, views, etc., with which it commonly collocates. However, when it is inserted in a multi-word unit such as the one in (3), it immediately makes part of a regular paradigm of other adjectives such as acute, sympathetic, trained or commiserative. This adjective when used as a variational collocate displays a distinct preference for co-occurring with items denoting sympathy or accuracy, which leads us to conclude that the variational semantic prosody of have an ear for is positive. Another example of variational semantic prosody can be observed in the instantiations of the PhU cast an eye on sth. This phrase is normally found in actual contexts of use modified by the insertion of an adjective. A search in the BNC shows that the variational collocates of the phraseological nominal base eye are critical, experienced, cold, professional, shrewd, speculative, acute, cautious and appraising to mention just the most frequently used adjectives. These collocates form a homogenous group and share the same semantic trait, that of expertise, with the exception of the adjective speculative which deviates from the general pattern. New paradigmatic relations are then established between the core nominal constituent of a PhU whenever an internal modification through the insertion of an adjective takes place.

Variation through lexical insertion

Insertion of external constituents is a very recurrent means of instantiating PhUs, especially in media discourse. This phenomenon is overwhelmingly widespread in the press and the number of occurrences can be at times extraordinary. These insertions are either a result of the contextualization of PhUs or of the processes of quantification or qualification concerning all the lexical units of the language, including PhUs. This significant trend has been extensively studied [START_REF] Nicolas | Semantics of idiom modification[END_REF][START_REF] Moon | Fixed Expressions and Idioms in English: A Corpus-based Approach[END_REF]Naciscione, 2000;Langlotz, 2006a) and is gaining more and more attention in phraseological research. The interesting thing is that we can find some regularity if we look, for example, at the adjectives that are normally used for this purpose: political, moral, judicial, domestic, academic, financial, economic, intellectual, historical, commercial, statistical, etc., which all belong to the same notional paradigm. These adjectives function as "domain delimiters" (Ernst 1981:51) or as "viewpoint modification", considered to be "the most widely available form of internal modification for idioms" (Nicolas 1995:241). These intrusive adjectives have lately been identified as "concern modifiers" and can be used with the majority of idioms, even with the most frozen ones which can also allow this type of modification (Stathi 2007:85). But other word classes can find their way into the lexicographic form of PhUs. Adverbs and nouns are sometimes inserted with the aim of modifying the whole string or only a specific constituent part. Insertion is numerically mainly adjectival although adverbs, nouns (generally as adnominal premodifiers) and even prepositions can be inserted in the canonical forms of idioms. Apart from adverbs, which represent the second most important variation through lexical insertion, and noun modifiers, the presence of other word classes represents either minor instances or clearly nonce variants.

Adjective insertion

Extraneous adjectives inserted in PhUs are not only used to provide semantic focus or specialization (Moon 1998:128) but they can serve other purposes such as emphasis, intensification or they can even be used for expressing emotion. The most detailed study on variation on English PhUs through adjective insertion was carried out by [START_REF] Th | Grist for the linguistic mill: idioms and 'extra' adjectives[END_REF]. This American scholar regards this phenomenon as a stylistic device and classifies these adjectives into three categories: "external modification", "internal modification" and "conjunction modification". "Domain delimiters" (or external modification) are adjectives such as political, financial or social which function as sentence adverbs and which modify the meaning of an idiom as a unit. "Internal modification", in its turn, concerns adjectives that modify only a noun which is part of an idiom. Finally, "conjunction modification" consists in the insertion of an adjective in a metaphorical or opaque idiom combining with the noun to get a literal meaning, in other words a sort of syllepsis. An intermediate level can be established inside the so-called domain delimiters as some of them can also be interpreted as locative, causal or temporal (Stathi 2007:93).

Examples (4), ( 5) and ( 6) are but a few instances of this overwhelmingly salient, pervasive and far-reaching phenomenon: Examples proliferate and can be found in abundance. Introducing an adjective in the canonical form of a well-known idiomatic expression is a stylistic device very popular in journalistic texts. The insertion of the adjective political represents in itself a remarkable lexicological and phraseological phenomenon. A search in the BNC shows that the typical and most frequent collocates of the adjective political are, in order of frequency, party, system, power, science and prisoners. The nominal bases associated to this adjective when it becomes a variational collocate can be as disparate as the following: mountain, football, skin, chickens, tiger, slap, spotlight, bullet or strings. Let us consider the examples below:

(7) This tiny margin would be enough to save the political skin of Patricia Hewitt, the health secretary, who threatened to resign if she could not pull the NHS as a whole out of the red. (The Guardian, February 21 2007) (8) Sir Bob persuaded Mr Blair to launch the Commission for Africa report 18 months ago, but the prime minister may now find he is riding a political tiger that he no longer controls. (The Guardian, June 1 2005) (9) But this is nothing set against the criticism that would be due to those who would endanger a vital part of Britain's infrastructure for the sake of giving a political bloody nose, and maybe worse, to their own leader. (The Observer, January 25 2004)

As is often the case, but not always, the inserted adjective qualifies syntactically a noun with which it never collocates in free combinations, that is outside the frame and constraints of more or less fixed and motivated PhUs. This type of variation is very widespread, fairly consistent and makes a substantial contribution to the specific meaning of PhUs. In all the three examples above, the intrusive adjective can be paraphrased as 'politically speaking' or 'in the political sphere', which tallies with the idea that "adjectives inserted into NPs in V-NP idioms can, where they are well formed, systematically be interpreted as adverbial modifiers of the whole idiom" (Nicolas 1995: 236). This principle is quite restrictive since all sorts of adjectives can modify core nominal constituents in PhUs, and furthermore, they can have diverse semantic values not always interpretable adverbially.

Adverb insertion

Inserting an adverb in a PhU does not differ considerably from inserting an adjective as we are dealing in both cases with the introduction of a certain degree of qualification which concerns the holistic meaning of the string. This type of lexical insertion is less frequent than inserting adjectives in PhUs but it tends to recur rather systematically in a number of multiword units that function syntactically as adverbials. In the case of with one's tongue in one's cheek, modulation of the holistic meaning of the string is achieved by the insertion of an adverb as in the examples below:

(10) With Moyles having continually boasted, with his tongue only slightly in his cheek, that he was the "saviour of Radio 1", Parfitt will be banking on the laddish loudmouth to bring listeners to the key slot, which is the most important on the station as it sets the tone for the rest of the day. (The Guardian, January 5 2004) (11) I think I have mixed feelings about Cage: half admiration for his independence of spirit and originality, half a suspicion that he was having a bit of a laugh at everyone's expense. He must have had his tongue firmly in his cheek. If he hadn't, he would have been a bit of a wanker. (The Guardian, January 16 2004) Instances of the variant form found in (11) are particularly numerous in discourse, which shows its high level of institutionalisation. Lexical insertion, and especially adverb insertion, calls into question the syntactic frozenness typical of idioms as these adverbs modify the holistic meaning of the idiom semantically and syntactically: no other way of modulation is possible if the string in question is to be retained. Other types of adverbs can also be inserted:

(12) "I want to make a decision once the dust has well and truly settled. One thing's certain, reality's not going to be helped by a weekend of celebrations," he said. (The Guardian, October 18 2004) (13) At a time when other broadcasters have been criticised for withdrawing from the regions -with the axe currently hanging over ITV's regional studios in Nottinghama move would underline the corporation's commitment to devolving its centres of production to cities including Manchester, Glasgow and Birmingham. (The Guardian, As with the examples concerning with one's tongue in one's cheek, the presence of the noncompositional binomial well and truly in (12) modulates the degree of completion of the action denoted by the verb. Adverbs of time as in ( 13) or adverbs of manner as in ( 14) are also possible as internal modification of PhUs. It is interesting to notice the syntactic analysability of the latter two phrases that allows the insertion of an adverb in the same slot where an adverb would normally be inserted in a free combination.

Noun insertion

It is the semantic nature of the core idiom components that accounts for the preference of a specific word-class type as the inserted lexical item. The PhU jump / climb / get on the bandwagon shows a marked preference for noun modification as illustrated by the following examples:

(15) Oxford's refusal to board the managerialism bandwagon was an important result for all universities, says Nicholas Bamforth. (The Guardian, December 20 2006) (16) 'I knew that was me as soon as it started,' Westwood says, 'but then dance music came in -house music -and all those guys who jumped on the hip-hop bandwagon just jumped straight off.' (The Observer, October 3 2004) This phrase is usually recorded taking into account the degree of variability of its verbal component. As a result, it is common to find several synonymous or quasi-synonymous verbs as part of the lemmatised form. However, no mention of its immense potentiality of variability through lexical insertion is made in dictionary description except for the fact that the vast majority of the examples illustrative of the phrase tend to include an extraneous lexical item. The variational schema on + the + [N] + bandwagon is to be found in 7 occurrences in the BNC and in 20 in the COCA. It should be noted that our corpus has yielded a total of 8 occurrences of the same schema, which accounts for the rapid advance and pervasive use of this specific variational pattern if parameters such as time span and corpus volume are taken into account.

The analysability of the core nominal constituents in the PhUs in ( 16) and ( 17 In ( 17) the insertion of the compound noun human rights is the result of a post-nominal modification becoming pre-nominal. The idiom bang the drum is usually instantiated in discourse followed by the preposition for and a noun phrase, which means that bang the drum for human rights has been syntactically transformed into bang the human rights drum. The existence of free combinations such as push the power / copy / play / record button and of the PhU push the panic button definitely sets the syntactic conditions for the creation and acceptability of this variant form in (18).

Semantic values of inserted adjectives

Delimiters

Classifying adjectives such as financial, intellectual, social, etc. have been defined as

Emphasisers

A pleonastic relation between two elements occurs when one of them seems redundant and appears not to add any semantic information not already supplied by the other element. Some adjectives can be inserted in PhUs with the sole aim of emphasising the idiomatic meaning of the string as a whole.

(21) "There is massive inefficiency in the system. We have started from complete scratch.

We are a very much leaner and very much meaner machine." (The Guardian, February 19 2004) (22) But while it's clear that the government wants to bask in the reflection of the hunters' current popularity, it also wants to keep a tight lid on this year's festival. (The Observer, June 19 2005) The adjective complete in (21) does not add any new information to the original phrase from scratch but serves to emphasise one of the most lexically and syntactically transparent PhUs in English. This variant form could be glossed as "from the very beginning". As it happens with very, the inserted adjective in ( 21) is used to add emphasis to the noun that it precedes.

No occurrences of this variant have been found either in the BNC or in the COCA, compared to just 11 occurrences for the variant form in ( 22) found in the COCA.

Expressive adjectives

Some adjectives carry expressive meaning: they express an emotional state on the part of the speaker or writer. This is the case of expletives such as bloody in "Yes, I broke the bloody window", or goddam in "You're behaving like a goddam husband", adjectives which are devoid of any descriptive meaning. The analysability of the nominal constituents in ( 23) and ( 24) is even more evident in the light of these examples which demonstrate the transparency of the units as a whole and their syntactic and lexical flexibility:

(23) Acting's hard anyway, but when you're Asian it's especially difficult. Five years ago there was nothing around. I started off doing a few TV bits, the usual Asian one-line things. And East Is East opened up every bloody door there was. (The Guardian, December 3 2004) (24) Hall admits that if writing comedy is hard, writing comic narrative is even harder. "I'm the make-me-laugh guy," he explains. "I gotta bake it from goddamn scratch every time." (The Guardian, November 27 2004)

Intensifying adjectives

Descriptive meaning in adjectives may vary in intensity without an actual change of quality.

Large and huge do not differ in quality, they designate the same area of semantic quality space but they differ in intensity. This scale of intensity takes the form of a regular paradigm of adjectives that can be inserted in PhUs allowing this sort of modification, generally nominal and prepositional phrases rather than predicate phrases. 25) and ( 26) could be glossed as "with a huge advantage" and "with great caution" respectively. Intensification relates here to the capacity of certain adjectives, which can be used to express both amount and degree, to signal the variance in intensity, as with the pair "great caution / extreme caution".

Remotivators

When introducing a remotivator, the idiomatic meaning of the string is still recoverable although the original metaphorical process is revived. This type of adjectives corresponds to Ernst's "conjunction modification" (1981:53). In (27) the adjective blond refers to Rraikkonen's hair colour, the noun feathers gets remotivated and instantially refers to his actual hair.

(27) There is speculation that Raikkonen may have his blond feathers ruffled by the arrival of Montoya next year. It could spell the end of his dominance at Woking. (The Guardian, March 2 2004) Instances of this type of internal modification can be subsumed under the heading of exploitation or manipulation of PhUs for stylistic reasons or for rhetorical effects.

Resultative adjectives

One last and minor type of adjectives that can be inserted in PhUs is made up of resultative adjectives. They modify the core nominal constituent of the idiom by means of a fairly limited paradigm of items such as resulting or consequent.

(28) After all, as the Times asserts, they have "manufactured their own weapon of intellectual mass destruction, and have disappeared in the resulting puff of smoke". (The Guardian, October 9 2004) In ( 28) the noun phrase puff of smoke is remotivated and both the idiomatic and the nonidiomatic readings are possible.

Conclusions

Variation through lexical insertion in PhUs is mainly adjectival. This phenomenon represents a pervasive stylistic device favoured by journalists in media discourse. Some variant forms produced by the insertion of adjectives in the lexicographic form of PhUs can eventually become lexicalised. The concept of semantic prosody proves valuable when analysing idiom variation through adjective insertion. Some regular variational paradigms can be observed in this procedure, which shows that this lexico-grammatical and phraseological phenomenon cannot simply be boiled down to exploitation or stylistic manipulation. Furthermore, modifying adjectives are not just used in order to supply as much background or contextual information as possible, they can also be used for emphasis, evaluation or as expletives, in the same way as they function in free combinations. These variant forms tend to be, by and large, proportionally represented in the three corpora although synonymous or pragmatically interchangeable adjectives may occur in one corpus and not in another, as is the case with large and generous when inserted in the PhU take sth with a pinch / grain of salt or even commiserative or sympathetic when inserted in the PhU lend an ear.

( 4 )

 4 "Teenagers want to turn back the moral clock and are more reactionary than their parents," the Daily Telegraph's social affairs correspondent enthused. (The Guardian, March 18 2004)(5) Did A kill B? Was X liable for damage to Y? These "yes-no" or "either-or" questions are grist to the judicial mill. (The Guardian,February 3 2004) (6) According to his own pollsters, a worryingly large number of those people have decided that he has lost the domestic plot by spending too much time on foreign affairs.(The Observer, September 26 2004)

February

  The postmodernists who deny universal values in the name of cultural difference are unwittingly in cahoots with the tub-thumpers for Trafalgar and the groupies of St George.(The Guardian, February 21 2007)

  ), namely drum and button, allows the insertion of a noun or a noun phrase which delimits the referential scope of the phrase: (17) More positively, the new government agencies in and around the social care sector are starting to bang the human rights drum. (The Guardian, November 26 2003) (18) It should be possible for both sides to make fun of each other's accents, without pushing the racism button. (The Guardian, January 17 2007)

"

  domain delimiters" (Ernst 1981:51) since they delimit the referential scope of the string to a specific domain. By the same token, some noun modifiers such as money in money advice or school in school matters can also be considered domain delimiters. The principal function of adjectives is modification: the combination Adj + N prototypically restricts the domain designated by the noun alone to a subpart, and designates a subset of the entities denoted by the noun alone. Adjectives denoting provenance can also be classified as delimiters as shown in the following examples: (19) The phased withdrawal of the subvention would be traumatic, but it would do Scotland nothing but good to learn that public money does not grow on English trees. (The Guardian, December 4 2006) (20) That rejection should give Chen pause, but he is nevertheless committed to pursuing constitutional change in his second term, and constitutional change is a red rag to the Chinese bull. (The Guardian, March 26 2004)

( 25 )

 25 For Anglia's directors, defeat came with a considerable silver lining: just before losing their franchise, they sold the company for £22m to a rival, FirstGroup, which mistakenly thought a new deal was almost in the bag. (The Guardian, March 15 2004) (26) The LVF itself issued a statement to the Belfast Telegraph saying they weren't involved. But paramilitary statements are often taken with a generous pinch of salt. (The Guardian, April 29 2005) The variant forms in examples (