FORCE-DYNAMIC SCHEMAS AND VARIABILITY OF VERBAL IDIOMS

Sažetak: The paper explores the variability of verbal idioms that reflect force-dynamic schemas in English and Croatian. The aim is to determine, using data from large electronic corpora, in which ways force-dynamic schemas constrain the variability of the lexical-grammatical structure of verbal idioms in these two languages. The results show that the forms in which verbal idioms occur in English and Croatian are limited to those types of constructions that express relations between the participants in an event within an event schema, namely action, transfer or motion. It is also shown that, given the specific type of force-dynamic schema that verbal idioms reflect, their degree of variability also varies, and they occur in more or fewer forms. This shows that the variability of verbal idioms is constrained by both meaning and grammatical structure.