The Idiom, the Lexicon, and the Formation of a Sentence

관용 표현과 어휘부, 그리고 문장의 형성

The idiom is listed in the lexicon, because it's meaning cannot be inferred from it's constituents. And the idiom is a single semantic unit. Thus the idiom is inserted to the syntax in the quality of a word. But the idiom is not always inserted to the syntax as a word. In the process generating the sentence, we can recognize the categorial property of the idiom that it is formally equal to the syntactic phrase. Then each of the constituents of the idiom can be inserted to the syntax. This is why the syntactic operation(as modification, topicalization, relativization, etc) can be applied to the constituent of the idiom. In this respect the idiom is a flexible construction as the listeme of a lexicon. The flexible property of the idiom is related to the dynamicity of a lexicon. The formal or semantic transformation of the idiom is the good example to show the dynamicity of a lexicon.