Entrenchment and Creativity in Chinese Quadrasyllabic Idiomatic Expressions

This paper aims to explore a special type of idiomatic expressions of even length called Quadrasyllabic Idiomatic Expressions (QIEs) in Chinese, and explain their variations with reference to semantic and structural constraints on the elements imposed by the construction of QIEs on the one hand, and its interplay with individual semantic elements in semantic space in the comprehension task of QIEs variants. Results of human ratings and behavioral experiment both show that semantic distance affects the speed of comprehension with the construction entrenchment. For those QIEs with idiomaticity, semantic distance leads to no major effect. We show that Chinese QIEs provide an ideal testing ground for the empirical investigation of the functional linguistic notion of entrenchment in processing multi-morphemic strings.