Prosody and idioms in English

English idioms commonly appear to exhibit relatively fixed prosodic patterns, and departure from the expected prosodic pattern can give rise to humorous and bizarre effects. As idioms are generally supposed to require phrasal entries in the mental lexicon, there is some initial plausibility in the proposal that such entries might include arbitrary prosodic or accentual properties. Various categories of idiom can be distinguished, according to which aspects of the prosodic pattern seem to be fixed, and the relationship the pattern bears to those which would be expected on corresponding literal expressions. Nevertheless it is argued that the prosodic patterns of idioms are in reality neither fixed nor arbitrary. The bizarre effects in interpretation result not from deviation from a lexically specified pattern, but from the attempt to introduce focus distinctions into the non-compositional parts of idioms. Implications for psycholinguistic studies of the processing of ambiguous sentences are discussed.