Idioms: The type-sensitive storage model

Julia Horvath; Tal Siloni

doi:10.1515/ling-2019-0017

Article

Idioms: The type-sensitive storage model

Julia Horvath and Tal Siloni

Published/Copyright: June 8, 2019

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From the journal Linguistics Volume 57 Issue 4

Abstract

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.

Keywords: phrasal idiom; clausal idiom; lexical storage

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by Grant No 2009269 from the United States–Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF). Earlier versions of this article were presented at the TAU-GU workshop on Relative Clauses and Idioms, Goethe University (Frankfurt, November 2014), at the 8th Brussels Conference on Generative Linguistics (BCGL): The Grammar of Idioms, CRISSP KU Leuven (Brussels, June 2015), at the Potsdam Workshop on Idioms, Potsdam University (Potsdam, November 2015), and at The Syntax of Idioms Workshop, Utrecht University (Utrecht, January 2017). We would like to thank the audiences at these presentations, as well as two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments.

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Published Online: 2019-06-08

Published in Print: 2019-07-26

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2019-0017

Keywords for this article

phrasal idiom; clausal idiom; lexical storage