§7.4 Verbal idioms 145[35]; and so on. Two other constructions that often contain such verbal idioms are
illustrated in [39]:[3^9 ] He finally backed down. Her fa ther passed away. When will you grow up?
Kim and Pa t have fa llen out. Do you think the idea will catch on?
ii This ties in with your first point. I'm not going to put up with this any longer.
Lizjust gets by on her pension. Yo u should stand up to him.Those in [i] consist of a verb and a preposition without a complement. Non
idiomatic examples of this construction are seen in She came in or She went out,
where in and out are goal complements.
The idioms in [ii] consist of a verb + a preposition with no complement + a
preposition with an NP complement. In in tie in with, for example, has no com
plement while with has your first point as its complement. A non-idiomatic
example of this construction is She came in with her uncle.Idioms need not be syntactic constituents
Idiom is a lexical concept. Idioms have to be listed and described in a dictionary of
the language, because of their particular form and special idiomatic meanings. But
it would be a mistake to assume that what counts as a lexical unit will necessarily
form a syntactic unit as well. This is not so. The underlined expressions in [39i] do
happen to be syntactic constituents: they are VPs with the verb as head and the pp
as complement. But those in [39ii] are not; here the lexical and syntactic units do
not match up.
Take as an example the sentence This ties in with your first point. As we have
said, with is a preposition taking your first point as its complement, so with your
first point forms a PP. Syntactically, the VP consists of three constituents (ties +
in + with your first point), not two (ties in with + your first point). This is evident
from the way the idiom behaves in the relative clause construction discussed
above. For alongside the stranded preposition version a point which this ties in
with we have the more formal version with preposition fronting a point with
which this ties in, where the fronted with which clearly forms a PP. Note also the
possibility of inserting a clause adjunct after in: This ties in well with your first
point.
More obvious are examples like hold NP1 against NP 2 from [33ii], since here the
verb has an object which separates it from the preposition and isn't part of the
idiom. For example, in I won 't hold it against you if you refuse, there is a special
idiomatic meaning associated with the use of hold together with against (roughly,
"I won't ju dge you adversely if you refuse"), but there is no syntactic constituent
consisting solely of hold and against: they aren't even adjacent in the sequence of
words.
The important thing about idioms, then, is that they have special and unpre
dictable meanings, but that is the only respect in which they are special. They do not
also constitute special syntactic units with peculiar structure. In syntactic structure