Flexibility in Persian Idiomatic Expressions: The case of "Hand-Idioms"

AbstractFlexibility in idioms may occur at different lexical, morpho-syntactic and syntactic levels. In flexible idioms, the core meaning remains unchanged. This descriptive-analytical study aims to investigate flexibility in Persian Idioms at the above-mentioned levels. The corpus contains 427 examples containing 160 "Hand-Idioms" in Najafi (1387/2008). The findings show that lexical flexibility occurs through the process of addition (nouns, adjectives, adverbs, quantifiers) and substitution (verbs and prepositions); morpho-syntactic flexibility happens through the addition of the plural marker "-ha" and the indefinite marker "–ya", and the syntactic flexibility happens through "postposing", "scrambling", "causative and intransitive structures", "objects substitution" and the addition of the "complements". Furthermore, it was found that Persian "Hand-Idioms" are more inclined towards "addition" and factors such as "definiteness", "information structure", "linguistic economy", "specification" and "expression of quantity" cause the motivation for the flexibility of the idioms. The findings of this research can be used by the authors of books on teaching idioms to non-Persian speakers and the relevant teachers to provide the learners with appropriate examples to show the features of flexible idioms.