General Principles

Naturally occurring examples are given preference to created examples.
Examples are marked as to whether they are created or natural.
Basis of the classification: Sag et al. 2002 and Baldwin and Kim 2010:
- Fixed MWEs: no flexibility allowed whatsoever.
- Semi-fixed MWEs: only meaningless, obligatory variation allowed.
- Flexible MWEs: variation allowed that indicates that part of the MWE should be assigned meaning.
For each MWE, for each constituent inside this MWE: apply tests for its degree of flexibility
Criteria to determine the size of a MWE:
- lexically obligatory material is included
- for predicative MWEs: if compatible with all/most predicative constructions (including verbless constructions such as small clauses, absolute with-construction, ...), then no verb is included, but the MWE is marked for predicativeness
- for negative polarity-MWEs: if the negation in not part of the MWE as a fixed lexical element, the negative marker is not lexically included in the MWE, but its NPI-hood is marked (ideally as strong or weak)

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Parseme MWE Template: General Comments