... transitive verbs in the corpus; isthe set of all nouns appearing as the direct objectof some verb; is the frequency of andoccurring as a verb object pair; is thetotal frequency of the target verb ... select our development and test expressionsfrom verb noun pairs that involve a member of apredefined list of (transitive) “basic” verbs. Ba-sic verbs, in their literal use, refer to states oracts ... the casefor the literal phrase shoot the bird.In this study, we focus on a particular class ofEnglish phrasal idioms, i.e., those that involve thecombination of a verb plus a noun in its direct...