6 Ill-Formedness and Transformability in Portuguese Idioms

Idioms are usually defined by their property of semantic eccentricity; they are meaningful strings whose meaning is not a direct function of the meanings of their components. In linguistics and Psycholinguistics, the main problem posed by idioms is the necessity (in grammatical analysis and comprehension) of treat-ing the string as a unit rather than decomposing it into its parts. The syntactic behavior of idioms has been important to this problem principally because of variability among idioms in the extent to which they maintain their idiomaticity under syntactic transformation. Treating an idiomatic string as a unitary item has loomed large as a problem because so many idioms are, in principle at least, susceptible to a parallel literal reading. Buckets can be kicked, beans spilled, and ice broken in the real, as well as the idiomatic, world. Indeed, much of the literature on the processing of idioms has focused on the question of whether the literal meaning of an idiom is activated when the idiom is encountered; this question only has meaning, of course, for idioms with a literal counterpart. Not all idioms have a literal counterpart, however. For semantic or syntactic reasons, a literal interpretation may be completely ruled out. We refer to such idioms as ill-formed. Semantic ill-formedness usually arises because of vio-lations of selection restrictions among the idiom's components—it is difficult to see how one could literally rack one's brains, for example. Syntactic ill-formed-ness usually violates subcategorization restrictions; thus, only in the idiom can one be in the know, because elsewhere in the language know functions solely as a verb. Perhaps because so much of the literature on idioms and idiom processing deals (as usual) exclusively with English, syntactic and semantic ill-formednes