Volume 57, Issue 4 - Special Issue: The compositionality and syntactic flexibility of verbal idioms, Guest Editors: Norbert Corver, Jeroen Van Craenenbroeck, William Harwood, Marko Hladnik, Sterre Leufkens and Tanja Temmerman

Idioms are a compelling subject of study for linguists, lexicographers and psycholinguists due to their seemingly idiosyncratic status as lexical units that pose challenges for integration into accepted grammatical frameworks. The literature reveals much disagreement on the semantic compositionality, syntactic flexibility and lexical variation of both specific idioms and idioms as a class. We analyze some of the sources for the disparate analyses, which are most often based on judgments of constructed rather than attested examples. Relying solely on corpus data from English and German that shows a wide range of syntactic and lexical variation independent of semantic compositionality, we argue that speakers’ use of idioms is in fact compatible with the rules governing freely composed language. This article is based on a talk given at the BSGL 2015 meeting on idioms in Brussels (Fellbaum 2015b).

The syntactic literature on idioms contains some proposals that are surprising from a compositional perspective. For example, there are proposals that, in the case of verb-object idioms, the verb combines directly with the noun inside its DP complement, and the determiner is introduced higher up in the syntactic structure, or is late-adjoined. This seems to violate compositionality insofar as it is generally assumed that the semantic role of the determiner is to convert a noun to the appropriate semantic type to serve as the argument to the function denoted by the verb. In this paper, we establish a connection between this line of analysis and lines of work in semantics that have developed outside of the domain of idioms, particularly work on incorporation and work that combines formal and distributional semantic modelling. This semantic work separates the composition of descriptive content from that of discourse referent introducing material; our proposal shows that this separation offers a particularly promising way to handle the compositional difficulties posed by idioms, including certain patterns of variation in intervening determiners and modifiers.

We argue that the counterpart of Marantz’s generalization does not hold in the nominal domain, because there are idioms in which the determiner and the noun receive an idiomatic meaning while the PP that modifies the noun is not part of the idiom (we call these “PP-less idioms”). We show that PP-less idioms are fully expected if the hypothesis of parallelism between nominal structure and clausal structure is dropped and it is assumed that the first step of the derivation in the nominal domain involves merge of D and N. As for the mirror image of PP-less idioms, “PP-containing idioms”, namely DPs where N and the PP that follows the noun receive an idiomatic reading while D does not, we suggest that they are not generated by syntax but are rather the output of the morphological component.

Idiom surveys conducted on both English and Hebrew motivate a distinction between phrasal idioms, which are headed by a lexical head, and clausal idioms, which involve sentential functional material. The surveys show that these two types of idioms have different patterns of distribution across diathesis alternations. A verbal passive phrasal idiom necessarily shares its idiomatic meaning with the corresponding transitive, while the unaccusative, adjectival passive and transitive can head their own phrasal idioms. This behavior of phrasal idioms contrasts with the strong tendency of clausal idioms to be specific to a single diathesis. The Type-Sensitive Storage (TSS) model, which we propose, accounts for these findings, by motivating a different storage (lexical listing) strategy for each idiom-type. Phrasal idioms are argued to be stored as subentries, while clausal idioms are independent entries. Assuming the verbal passive is derived post-lexically, thus lacking its own lexical entry, the model explains why it cannot host idiomatic meanings specific to it. In contrast, the adjectival passive, unaccusative and transitive have their own lexical entries under the model, and thus can have their own idiomatic meanings. Clausal idioms are stored as independent entries, and therefore their storage does not depend on the existence of other lexical entries.