Chiarung LuI-Ni TsaiI-Wen SuTE-HSIN LIU2020-02-252020-02-252020-01978-3-030-38188-2978-3-030-38189-90302-97431611-3349https://scholars.lib.ntu.edu.tw/handle/123456789/463752© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020. Adopting the theoretical framework of Construction Grammar, the present paper aims to examine the internal structures, constructional meanings, and syntactic categories of Mandarin parallel idiomatic prefabs A-X-A-Y. The analysis once again confirms the importance of semantic integration between lexical and constructional meanings. Although X and Y seem to dictate the syntactic category of a four-character idiomatic expression, the syntactic category of the whole idiom is indeed adjustable in contextualized real-world language use. This prominent feature, i.e., the flexibility in terms of syntactic behavior, results from the markedness of the four-character skeleton, namely, a grammatical construction. This syntactic flexibility is then argued to be the essential property of Chinese four-character idioms.AXAY | Chinese four-character idioms | Construction | Lexical semantics | QIEjournal article6674930410.1007/978-3-030-38189-9_212-s2.0-85078424298https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38189-9_2166749304