Title:
|
Idioms and the syntax/semantics interface of descriptive content
vs. reference
|
Author:
|
McNally, Louise, 1965-; Gehrke, Berit
|
Abstract:
|
The syntactic literature on idioms contains some proposals that are surprising from a compositional perspective. For example, Sportiche (2005) and Cecchetto and Donati (2015) propose 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 a mixed formal and distributional semantic model developed in McNally (2017); McNally and Boleda (2017). 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. |
Abstract:
|
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No 715154), grant FFI2016-76045-P (AEI/MINEICO/FEDER, UE), a Salvador de Madariaga mobility grant from the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports, an ICREA Academia award, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. |
Subject(s):
|
-Idiom -Incorporation -Event kind -Modification -Reference |
Rights:
|
info:eu-repo/semantics/embargoedAccess
© De Gruyter Published version available at https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/ling.2019.57.issue-4/ling-2019-0016/ling-2019-0016.xml http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ling-2019-0016 |
Document type:
|
Article Article - Accepted version |
Published by:
|
De Gruyter
|
Share:
|
|