Modification of literal meanings in semantically non-decomposable idioms

In the literature on idioms, conjunction modification is understood as involving a modifier that does not lexically belong to the idiom at hand, modifying the literal meaning of a noun in that idiom while the idiomatic meaning of the expression as a whole is preserved. The construction relies on the hearer perceiving the idiomatic meaning of the whole and the literal meaning of a part of it simultaneously and in conjunction. We investigate instances of naturally occurring examples of four semantically non-decomposable verb-phrase idioms (two English, two German) whose complements contain such a modifier. We examine the possible interpretations and the contextual conditions of these idiom-modifier combinations. They are particularly interesting instances of one-to-many relations between form and meaning.