How frozen are frozen idioms?

In this talk, I will present new data on the lexical, morphological, and syntactic flexibility of the semantically non-decomposable English VP-idiom “kick the bucket” — one of the most prominent idioms in the linguistic literature. Building on Bargmann and Sailer (to appear), I will point towards an analysis of this idiom (and other idioms of this kind) that involves individual word-level lexical entries that combine according to the standard rules of syntax and contribute a (in some cases partially redundant) piece of the meaning of the idiom as a whole.