Did the Verb in Some V NP Idioms Have a Related Meaning when the Idiom Emerged?: A Historical Perspective

The paper takes as a starting point Hamblin and Gibbs's (1999) claim that kick alone already had the sense 'die' before it was used in the idiom kick the bucket, and this may be the case with verbs in other nondecomposable expressions. The idioms provided by Hamblin and Gibbs (1999) are examined for attestations in OED and the dates are compared with the dates of matching meanings of the verbs to see whether the verb with the same sense emerged before the idiom. The verb is considered to have a matching sense if it is the same as the holistic sense of the expression (where this sense cannot be distributed over the components) or the sense of the verbal part of the idiom (where the idiom is decomposable). It has been found that the verbs of some idioms (typically decomposable expressions) emerged in a matching sense before the idiom appeared. Kick the bucket is exceptional, since the verbs of nondecomposable idioms do not have senses closely related to the idiomatic meaning.