Abstract
This paper examines the issues of idioms in verb-object constructions in Taiwanese Southern Min and Mandarin. The idioms in question fall into two categories: (1) idioms that express a personal behavior, and (2) idioms that show an interpersonal relationship. The second type can be further divided into two subtypes: (2a) cases where only two parties are involved, and (2b) cases that feature a tripartite relationship. Such a semantic distinction carries its syntactic consequences. There is also a fine-grained distinction among idioms in terms of degree of semantic compositionality: (1) idioms that are characterized by an absolute non-compositionality, and (2) idioms in which the meanings of some constituents are calculatable in terms of the mechanism of metaphor. Some idioms of the former type can be analyed vis-a-vis the pivot based upon homophony. Referntiality of the object in the verb-object construction has an intimate relationship with its syntactic flexibility.
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