On a systematic component of meaning in idioms

Date
2002-09
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Calgary
Abstract
It has traditionally been assumed that the meaning of some or all phrasal idioms is non-compositional. However, I argue here that the aspectual meaning of idioms is completely systematic: there are no special aspectual restrictions on idioms, and moreover, the aspectual properties of an idiom are compositional, combining the aspectual properties of its syntactic constituents in the usual way. I show that this observation supports the theory of Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1994).
Description
Keywords
Linguistics, Idioms, Semantics, Morphology
Citation
McGinnis, M. (2002). On a systematic component of meaning in idioms. Calgary Working Papers in Linguistics, 24(Fall), 1-8.