Abstract Variant forms of idioms have been retrieved from an American English corpus of 450 million words to test the idiom decomposition hypothesis. The central claim of the hypothesis concerns the relationship between the degree of decomposability and the flexibility of idiomatic expressions: the more decomposable the idiom is, the more variable it is assumed to be. While Part I of the study is concerned with variation in the verb, Part II focuses on operations in the noun phrase constituent of the idiom. Part I compares flexibility data based on syntactic alternations pertaining to the expression as a whole and morphological variations of the verb (number, person, tense, aspect, mood, voice, negation) with one categorical and two scalar decomposability rankings. For the vast majority of verb-related variations, flexibility is not correlated with decomposability. The morphological category of voice has been found dependent on categorical decomposability, but it is not the highest decomposability class that exhibits the highest degree of variability.

中文翻译：

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成语变化和可分解性第一部分：语言变化

摘要从4.5亿个单词的美国英语语料库中检索了成语的各种形式，以测试成语分解假设。该假设的中心主张涉及可分解性程度与惯用语表达的灵活性之间的关系：成语的可分解性越强，则其可变性就越大。研究的第一部分关注动词的变体，而第二部分则关注成语中名词短语组成部分的操作。第一部分比较灵活性数据，该数据基于与整体表达有关的句法替换以及动词（数量，人，时态，方面，情绪，声音，否定）的形态变化与一个分类和两个标量可分解性等级。对于与动词相关的绝大多数变体，灵活性与可分解性无关。已发现语音的形态类别取决于分类可分解性，但并不是最高可分解性类别显示出最高的可变性。