Idiom variation in English and Croatian

shown that a number of idioms have a fairly flexible structure, i.e. they occur in one or more conventionalized variants and may also be creatively exploited in the discourse. Furthermore, it has been shown that similar types of idiom variation occur in different European languages, for example English (cf. e.g. Nunberg, Sag and Wasow 1994), Croatian (Parizoska 2009), Italian (Cignoni and Coffey 1998), Russian (Dobrovol’skij 2007), etc. Among these are lexical substitution, adnominal modification, passivization, noun inflection, omission of one or more components, change of word order and perspectival variants (e.g. caused-motion vs. self-motion). Studies of lexical and syntactic behaviour of idioms (e.g. Gibbs and Nayak 1989; Gibbs et al