Idiom

et, but also the fact that the meaning of the resultant combination is opaque - it is not related to the meaning of the individual words, but is sometimes (though not always) nearer to the meaning of a single word (thus kick the bucket equals die). Even where an idiom is semantically like a single word it does not function like one. Thus we will not have a past tense * kick-the-bucketed. Instead, it functions to some degree as a normal sequence of grammatical words, so that the past tense form is kicked the bucket. But there are a great number of grammatical restrictions. A large number of id