Idiomatic expressions and anaphoric reference in functional discourse grammar

This paper deals with a special kind of anaphoric relation involving reference by or to a component part of a non-decomposable idiom. It is argued that, unlike generally assumed, such references are not necessarily stylistically deviant or grammatically marked, but that various systematic and productive patterns of use can be identified. On the basis of corpus data, and using the framework of Functional Discourse Grammar, a theoretical linguistic analysis of each of these patterns is proposed which reflects the linguistic processes involved in their production and interpretation, captures their systematicity and productivity, and goes some way towards explaining the cognitive cost and communicate gain involved in their use.