Rethinking the Idiomaticity Decomposability Hypothesis: Evidence from Distributional Learning

ArXi:2606.03817v1 Announce Type: new Idioms can be analysed in terms of their decomposability, the extent to which constituent meanings contribute to the figurative whole. Decomposability is thought to predict syntactic flexibility. Usage-based accounts instead attribute idiom behaviour to distributional experience, such as speaker familiarity and predictability. We examine these views using contextualised language models as controlled distributional learners.