I don't have hard numbers, but I know from experience that a large share of multiword expressions are non-compositional (the meaning of the larger phrase can't be inferred from its constituents), so in that case thinking of them as "over-divided" makes sense to me.
Comments
A related idea is linguistic "compositionality"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_compositionality
I don't have hard numbers, but I know from experience that a large share of multiword expressions are non-compositional (the meaning of the larger phrase can't be inferred from its constituents), so in that case thinking of them as "over-divided" makes sense to me.
In linguistics, we call such phrases "idioms".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiom