The present study is concerned with the syntactic flexibility of English verb phrase idioms. It is argued that in order to explain the syntactic behavior of these constructions best, two aspects must be considered. First, the idiom in question must be decomposable, meaning that the individual parts must have independent meaning and second pragmatic reasons and speakers' motivations must be taken into account. The corpus-based study with nine verb phrase idioms and the its results support a speaker-based grammar model. Furthermore, some syntactic constructions can be generally ruled out for idioms.