Phraseme

Phraseme, a lexeme that makes up a single semantic unit, even though it is formally complex, i.e. it consists of two or more lexemes. It is believed that all languages have phrasemes. English examples would be "so to speak, for a short time, goodness me, what's for dinner, good morning, dig your own grave, as a rule of thumb, the end of the road, pull someones leg" etc.The notion phraseme includes restricted collocations, conventional similes, and idioms. The notion has roots in the Continental European research tradition of phraseology, but is now gaining ground in Anglo-American linguistics as well. In this tradition, however, idiom is still often used as the generic form of all fixed expressions. As calques from Russian the notions phraseologism and phraseological units can also be found in literature on phraseology or idiom studies.

References

*Dobrovol'skij & Piirainen 2005. Figurative Language: Cross-Cultural and Cross-linguistic perspectives. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
*A.P. Cowie (ed) 1998. Phraseology: Theory, Analysis, and Applications. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
*Goddard, Cliff (2001). Lexico-Semantic Universals: A critical overview. In Linguistic Typology 5, 1-65.