Idiomatic Creativity and Emergent Fixedness: Gradient Lexical Specification in Large-Scale Cross-Linguistic Corpora

Abstract

Abstract This paper demonstrates that idiomatic fixedness is manipulation-dependent: the constructional elements that resist omission in idiom variants are systematically different from those that resist replacement. Using a manually verified dataset of over 14,000 idiomatic variants across 25 idioms in three languages (English, Japanese, and Korean), drawn from web-based TenTen corpora, we compare two types of structural manipulation – contraction, in which a canonical element is omitted, and substitution, in which it is replaced – to examine how figurative interpretation is preserved under each type of pressure. Results show that the set of retained constructional elements differs systematically between contraction and substitution, indicating that, for most longer idioms, no invariant core remains stable across manipulation types. Patterns that appear categorically fixed in intuition-based accounts instead emerge as context-sensitive stability effects visible only through large-scale digital aggregation of naturalistic data. For instance, in substitution variants like let the agenda out of the bag (canonical: let the cat out of the bag ), the canonically central element cat is sacrificed to ground reference in discourse, despite agenda ’s low collocational potential with bag . Analyzing retention asymmetries, we propose a refinement of the constructional continuum. We introduce a model where schematicity and lexical specification vary as partially independent dimensions, providing a framework that accounts for the negotiability trade-off observed when speakers balance figurative recognition with discourse-specific needs. Within this framework, fixedness is reconceptualized as context-dependent stability – an emergent equilibrium shaped by constructional and discourse constraints and usage frequencies rather than an inherent property of particular lexical items. Corpus methods thus provide empirical leverage for refining the theoretical architecture of Construction Grammar.