DOI 10.1515/phras-2017-0006 YoP 2017; 8: 95–122 Attila Cserép, University of Debrecen, Institute of English and American Studies, Department of English Linguistics, Debrecen Pf. 400. H-4002 Hungary, E-mail: cserep.attila@arts.unideb.hu Attila Cserép Idiom variation and decomposability Part I: Verbal variation 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 decom- posability 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 con- cerned 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 alterna- tions 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 vari- ations, flexibility is not correlated with decomposability. The morphological cat- egory of voice has been found dependent on categorical decomposability, but it is not the highest decomposability class that exhibits the highest degree of variability. Keywords: idiom, variation, decomposability 1 Introduction 1 One of the central issues addressed in idiom variation research is what proper- ties of idioms determine their flexibility. It has been suggested that idioms whose overall meaning can be distributed over the components are more variable than idioms whose individual constituents do not carry independent figurative mean- ings (Nunberg 1978: 129–130; Nunberg et al. 1994: 508). The former are decom- posable expressions, such as spill the beans ‘reveal the secret’, the latter are nondecomposable, such as chew the fat ‘chat’) (Gibbs and Nayak 1989; Gibbs et al. 1989b). Within decomposable idioms a subdivision can be made between normally decomposable expressions, whose words are closely related to their 1 I wish to express my gratitude to Sándor Márton for his help with the statistical calculations and the interpretation of the results.