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Idioms in Disguise: How Grammatical Profiling Reveals Phraseological Patterns Cover

Idioms in Disguise: How Grammatical Profiling Reveals Phraseological Patterns

Open Access
|Nov 2025

Abstract

This article examines how morphological anomalies – specifically, the unusually high frequencies of certain singular noun forms – can reveal idiomatic usage in Czech. Using data from the GramatiKat tool, 1,102 noun lemmas were analyzed, of which 28% participated in idiomatic expressions. The study identifies clear distributional patterns across grammatical cases, with idioms most frequent in the accusative, genitive, locative, and instrumental singular. Monocollocational idioms are distinguished, as they are associated with specific structural patterns. The results show that idiomatic expressions can influence morphological distributions and leave measurable traces in corpus data. The approach is further applicable to other parts of speech, such as verbs and adjectives, suggesting a broader role for grammatical profiling in the identification of idiomatic and phraseological patterns.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/jazcas-2025-0010 | Journal eISSN: 1338-4287 | Journal ISSN: 0021-5597
Language: English
Page range: 113 - 122
Published on: Nov 27, 2025
Published by: Slovak Academy of Sciences, Mathematical Institute
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services
Publication frequency: 2 issues per year

© 2025 Anna Vysloužilová, Dominika Kováříková, published by Slovak Academy of Sciences, Mathematical Institute
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.