Idioms crosslinguistically universal?

[jess tauber]

I've been in discussions with a linguist studying idioms in English and we started wondering whether all languages have idioms. I've already found online mention of projects comparing idioms in Eurasian areal perspective. But have enough studies been done on languages elsewhere to be able to claim universality as a form-class? In Yahgan, for ex.,idioms seem to have a very restricted distribution (generally certain noun-adjective compounds). Has anyone looked at this from a typological POV? I'd be posting this to LINGTYP but I usually get very few responses there. Thanks.

Jess Tauber