This paper presents some implications relating to the study of variant forms in phraseological units. It focuses on the analysis of variable elements in verbal phraseological units in English and Albanian. In spite of being composed of a fixed part and a variable one, such phrases are seen to have similarities in grammatical structure and lexical content. Variant forms reveal a great deal about human linguistic behavior and as such any kind of semantic and structural study of phraseological units requires the analysis of language in context as isolated forms cannot provide sufficient information about the semantic content of these expressions. In this respect, it is necessary to analyze the context for the study of connections between canonical forms of phraseological units and their creative variations. Literary discourse, the most prolific type of texts which makes use of creative phraseological variations, has been chosen to observe the semantic relations of such variations in both languages.