Rethinking the Idiomaticity Decomposability Hypothesis: Evidence from Distributional Learning
Idioms can be analysed in terms of their decomposability, the extent to which constituent meanings contribute to the figurative whole. Decomposability is thought to predict syntactic flexibility. Usage-based accounts instead attribute idiom behaviour to distributional experience, such as speaker familiarity and predictability. We examine these views using contextualised language models as controlled distributional learners. We propose a model-internal measure of decomposability and relate it to human ratings, syntactic flexibility, and predictability while tracking idiom learning during pretraining. Model-derived decomposability correlates weakly with human judgments and shows a small but...
| Authors | Maggie Mi, Golzar Atefi, Atsuki Yamaguchi et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 2 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 2 June 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.