Abstract Variant forms of idioms have been extracted from an American English corpus of 450 million words to test the idiom decomposition hypothesis, which proposes a dependence relation between the degree of idiom decomposability and the extent to which expressions are variable. The more decomposable the idiom is, the more flexibility it is expected to exhibit. In this second part of the study, morphological flexibility (number and determiner) as well as lexico- syntactic flexibility (the addition of various pre- and postmodifiers) of the noun have been assessed and related to three decomposability rankings. The results provide some support for the hypothesis. Of the individual flexibility dimensions, only number variation has been found to be significantly dependent on scalar decomposability. Of the overall measures, noun morphology and overall noun variation are significantly correlated. The relation between overall modifier variation and scalar decomposability is close to statistical significance, although premodifier and postmodifier variations taken separately do not show any dependence. None of the variation measures appear to be related to categorical decomposability.

中文翻译：

---

成语变化和可分解性第二部分：名词短语的变化

摘要从美国4.5亿个单词的语料库中提取成语的多种形式，以测试成语分解假设，该假设提出了成语可分解程度与表达式可变程度之间的依存关系。习惯用语越易分解，则期望表现出更大的灵活性。在研究的第二部分中，对名词的形态学灵活性（数量和确定因素）以及词汇句法灵活性（添加了各种修饰词和修饰语）进行了评估，并与三个可分解性排名相关。结果为该假设提供了支持。在各个柔韧性尺寸中，仅发现数量变化显着取决于标量可分解性。在整体措施中，名词形态与整体名词变异之间存在显着相关。整体修饰符变化与标量可分解性之间的关系接近统计显着性，尽管分别进行的前修饰符和后修饰符变化不显示任何依赖性。这些变化量度似乎都与分类可分解性无关。