Until comparatively recently, 'idiomatic' was something of a rag-bag category into which language teachers were apt to consign anything too awkward to be accounted for by the rules of syntax. 'Idiomatic' would explain, for example, why we have main roads but cannot say this road is main, why our houses can be spick and span but not just spick, why we can say you idiot but not me idiot or you stupid. These oddities were regarded as on the fringe of language, amusing but not nearly as important as the syntactic rules which regulate the largest part of language use. Second language teachers might use up a few lighted-hearted classroom minutes giving learners a colourful idiomatic phrase of the day, especially of the fixed or metaphorical phrase variety (he let the cat out of the bag, come to think of it, you're telling me!) but the main focus of the lesson should be on productive and law-abiding syntax. Although the notion that language is largely generated by a system of rules is still central to much second language acquisition research, there has been a shift of emphasis in some linguistic quarters (though not in most classrooms) away from the centrality of grammatical knowledge in language use and towards taking the rag-bag of 'idiomatic' usage far more seriously. There is now a body of research in linguistics which studies the extent to which words operate in fully or partially fixed combinations as opposed to within a productive system of syntactic rules (see Weinert, 1995, for an excellent review, also Howarth, 1998). The use of fully or partially fixed combinations of words has been suggested as a processing strategy in both first and second language use which permits fluent and fast language production (Raupach, 1984; Pawley and Syder, 1983). It has been further suggested that this is also a learning strategy adopted by both first and second language learners whereby regularly encountered combinations of words are committed unanalysed to memory and then analysed for productive grammatical regularities (Ellis, 1996).
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