Linguistic Status of Idioms

The Linguistic Status of Idioms
Gert Webelhuth & Manfred Sailer
University of Frankfurt
Minerva Summerschool, 2013
Webelhuth, Sailer (Frankfurt) Idioms 1 2013 1 / 46

Introduction and Outline
Outline of the course
Part 1
1 Characterizing the phenomenon
2 Idioms in Generative Grammar
3 Decomposable vs. non-decomposable idioms
4 Analytic challenge 1: Idiomaticity
5 Analytic challenge 2: Lexical ﬁxedness
6 Analytic challenge 3: Syntactic ﬁxedness
7 Summary of part 1
Part 2
8 Sketch of the framework
9 Summary of the data
10 Analysis of kick the bucket
11 Analysis of spill the beans
12 Analysis of pull strings
13 Summary

What is an idiom?
Idiom: phraseologism, phraseme, phraseological unit, multiword expression,
. . .
Prototypical properties:
phrasal
idiomatic: non-literal meaning; holistic meaning
ﬁxed: words cannot be exchanged; restricted syntactic ﬂexibility
lexicalized: conventionalized combination; represented as one unit

Some examples
(1) kick the bucket (‘die’)
a. idiomatic: ok
b. lexically fixed: = kick the pail; = throw the bucket
c. syntactically fixed: *The bucket was kicked.
d. lexicalized: ok
(2) spill the beans (‘reveal information’)
a. idiomatic: ok
b. lexically fixed: = spilled the pulse; = sling down the beans
c. syntactically fixed?: The beans were spilled. The beans are hard
to spill.
d. lexicalized: ok

Some examples cont.
(3) make headway (‘make progress’)
a. idiomatic: no? (cranberry word/bound word)
b. lexically fixed: ??achieve headway
c. syntactically fixed?: Considerable headway was made. How much
headway did they make on the job? *That much headway I’m sure
they made on the job. (Postal, 1998, p. 31)
d. lexicalized: ok
(4) brush one’s teeth (‘clean one’s teeth’)
a. idiomatic: no? (collocation, idiom of encoding)
b. lexically fixed?: I brushed my choppers; I cleaned/polished my
teeth
c. syntactically fixed?: The teeth were brushed; Those teeth he
hadn’t brushed in ages.
d. lexicalized?

Idioms in Generative Grammar Historical overview
Phrasal lexical entries in Chomsky (1965)
Consider, for example, such phrases as ‘take for granted’, which abound in
English. From a semantic and distributional point of view, this phrase seems
to be a single lexical item, and it therefore must be entered in the lexicon as
such, with its unique syntactic and semantic features. On the other hand its
behavior with respect to transformations and morphological processes
obviously shows that it is some sort of Verb-with-Complement construction.
Once again we have a lexical item with a rich internal structure (Chomsky,
1965, p. 190)

Historical overview
Chafe (1968): Four problems of idioms:
◮ non-compositional
◮ transformationally defective
◮ (sometimes) syntactically ill-formed
◮ idiomatic reading of a combination is more frequent than literal meaning.
Weinreich (1969):
◮ Phrasal lexical entry lists all possible transformations.
Fraser (1970):
◮ Idioms inserted with structure in D-Structure
◮ Classification according to syntactic flexibility.
Jackendoff (1975): Phrasal lexical entries with only partial specification,
for syntactically regular idioms: structure follows from syntactic rules as
lexical redundancy rule.

Idiom arguments in Principles and Parameters
Idiom inserted en bloc at D-Structure
Transformations apply to DS trees, even if of idiomatic origin.
More recently: Compositional aspects of idioms used to motivate
functional projections (X gave Y the boots — Y got the boots from X)
Predictions:
◮ Idioms have a regular syntactic structure.
◮ Idioms can have only canonical form, or canonical and transformed form; but
never: only transformed form
◮ Only the idiom as a whole has a meaning, idiom parts are not assigned
meaning.

Idioms in Generative Grammar Problems for the generative approaches
Important publications to change our views on idioms
Higgins (1974): Critique of en bloc insertion, attempt for a more semantic
theory; unpublished
Ernst (1981): Modiﬁers inside idioms as argument against monolithic
semantics of idioms
McCawley (1981): Idioms in relative clauses
Wasow et al. (1983); Nunberg et al. (1994): two classes of idioms
distinguished by decomposability (also: Langacker (1987))
Ruwet (1991): List of arguments against the traditional en bloc insertion
view

Arguments: Regular syntactic shape
Chafe (1968); Nunberg et al. (1994):
(5) trip the light fantastic (‘dance’)
(6) kingdom come (‘paradise’)
(7) easy come easy go

Arguments: No “transformed-only” idioms
Nunberg et al. (1994):
(8) passive only: (be) cast in stone
(9) wh-moved only: what the hell
(10) inverted only: Is the pope catholic?
(11) imperative only: Break a leg!

Arguments: Idiom parts are meaningless
Modification (Ernst, 1981)
(12) External modification:
a. Pat kicked the social bucket. (= Socially Pat kicked the bucket.)
b. Pat pulled some economic strings. (= Pat pulled some strings in
economy.)
(13) Internal modification:
a. Pat spilled the well-kept beans. (= Pat spilled the well-kept secret.)
b. Pat pulled some important strings. (= Pat used some important
connections.)
The existence of internal modification readings is strong evidence that idiom
parts can be meaningful.

Arguments: Idiom parts are meaningless
Determiner variation:
(14) Pat kicked the/*a bucket.
(15) Pat spilled the/some/many beans.
(16) Pat pulled the/many strings
Determiner variation supports the observations on modiﬁcation.

Additional problem: McCawley’s transformational
paradox
If the idiom pull strings must be inserted as one VP unit from the lexicon,
there is a paradox:
(17) The strings that Pat pulled got Chris the job.
(18) Pat pulled the necessary strings that got Chris the job.

Two classes of idioms
Wasow et al. (1983); Nunberg et al. (1994): decomposability
Idiomatically combining expressions (ICE): spill the beans, keep tabs on
s.o., make headway
◮ allow for internal modification
◮ idiom parts can occur in positions/constructions that require content
→ expect: syntactic flexibility
Idiomatic phrases (IPh): kick the bucket, trip the light fantastic
◮ no internal modification
◮ idiom parts cannot occur in positions/constructions that require content
→ less/no syntactic flexibility

Tests for ICEs
If an idiom part can occur in a position/construction that must have some
meaning, the idiom is decomposable.
(19) Internal modiﬁcation possible
(20) Determiner change possible
(21) Fronting possible:
a. The strings Pat has pulled.
b. * The bucket Pat has kicked.
(22) Pronominalization possible:
a. Pat pulled the strings and they proved essential.
b. * The bucket Pat has kicked.

Tests for ICEs cont.
If an idiom part can occur in a position/construction that must have some
meaning, the idiom is decomposable.
(23) Relative clause:
a. Partially inside a RelC:
The strings that Pat pulled got Chris the job.
*The bucket that Pat kicked was unexpected.
b. Internal modiﬁcation by a RelC:
Pat pulled the strings that got Chris the job
*Pat kicked the bucket that nobody expected.

Decomposability problematic/circular?
Decomposability is taken as a purely semantic notion. Not to be confused
with:
= transparency of the expression as a whole: saw logs (‘snore’)
(transparent, non-decomposable)
= plausible paraphrasability: kick the bucket = end life
(non-decomposable)

Two classes
Decomposability is defined via semantic flexibility criteria.
An expression that meets some of these criteria is decomposable, all
others are non-decomposable.
Nunberg et al. (1994) see a strong connection between semantic
decomposability and syntactic flexibility. The relation might be loser
(Webelhuth and Ackermann, 1994)

Aims of a formal analysis
What we want:
Varying syntactic ﬂexibility
Semantics of the well-formed strings
What we won’t talk about:
Relation between the literal and the non-literal meaning
Cognitive basis of idioms
Word play
text-constituting potential of idioms

Possible analyses
holistic analysis: the idiom is one phrasal unit in the lexicon
non-holistic analysis: the idiom parts have independent lexical entries
decomposable idiom non-decomposable idiom
all holistic analysis holistic holistic
partially holistic analysis non-holistic holistic
partially holistic analysis 2 holistic non-holistic
all non-holistic analysis non-holistic non-holistic

Possible analyses and their challenges
Idiomaticity
Lexical ﬁxedness
Syntactic ﬁxedness

Analytic challenge 1: Idiomaticity
Idiomaticity: Holistic approach?
The idiomatic meaning is associated with the idiom as a whole, but not with
any of its parts.
Version 1: one syntactic and semantic unit (en bloc insertion)
VP
sem: die
kick the bucket
or
VP
sem: die
V
sem: ??
kicked
NP
sem: ??
∆the bucket
Version 2: regular syntactic and semantic combinatorics; literal meaning
mapped to idiomatic meaning.
Version 3: regular syntactic and semantic combinatorics; head has
idiomatic meaning, other words have expletive semantics

any of its parts.
VP
sem: kick(ιx(bucket(x)))
die
V
sem: kick
kicked
NP
sem: ιx(bucket(x))
∆the bucket

any of its parts.
VP
sem: die
V
sem: die
kicked
NP
sem: –
∆the bucket

Holistic idiomaticity, version 1
Representatives: Generative Grammar, Sag et al. (2003) for IPh
Strengths:
◮ very intuitive: idioms are units; only the combination has idiomatic meaning
◮ syntactically ill-formed idioms (kingdom come ‘paradise’)
Problems:
◮ most idioms: morphological ﬂexibility (kick(ed) the bucket, trip(ped) the light
fantastic)
◮ ICE: internal modiﬁcation (spilled the well-kept beans)
◮ ICE: pronominalization (Pat pulled some strings, but they were completely
useless.)

Representatives: Pulman (1993), Egan (2008)
Literal parse mapped to idiomatic interpretation:
◮ Pulman (1993): sem.repr. → sem.repr. (special inference rules)
◮ Egan (2008): sem.repr. → pretense mode of interpretation
Strengths:
◮ no idiomatic words necessary
◮ literal meaning available; necessary for extended uses:
(24) If you let this cat out of the bag, a lot of people are going to get
scratched.
◮ possibly: relation to other cases of ﬁgurative language
Problems (Wearing, 2012)
◮ processing: idiomatic sense sometimes faster than literal sense.
◮ vague predictions on degree of syntactic ﬂexibility:
(25) Jane had a bone to pick with Susan, and Anne had one to pick
with Ian.
(26) * Tony shot the breeze with Junior, and Paulie shot it with Silvio.
Other problems
◮ Pulman (1993): type of inference required elsewhere?
◮Webelhuth, Sailer (Frankfurt) Idioms 1 2013 25 / 46

Representatives: Riehemann (2001) (for IPh); Sag et al. (2003) (for ICE)
Strengths:
◮ captures regular syntactic structure; no special interpretive devices
Problems:
◮ many words with expletive meaning
◮ ICEs: not plausible for meaningful idiom parts

Idomaticity: Non-holistic approach?
The parts of the idiom have individual lexical entries.
Version 1: Ambiguity approach: Words in idioms are ambiguous:
◮ spill reveal-idiom
◮ beans secret-idiom
◮ Pat spilled the beans: reveal-idiom(ιx(secret-idiom(x)))(pat)
Version 2: Overwrite approach: The words’ literal meaning is overwritten;
as in backformation
◮ VP meaning: reveal-idiom(ιx(secret-idiom(x)))
◮ “reverse compositionality”: post hoc association of the idiomatic meaning
with spill and beans

Non-holistic idiomaticity, version 1
Represenatives: Gazdar et al. (1985) (for ICE), Riehemann (2001) (for all
idioms), Sailer (2004) (for ICE), . . .
Strengths:
◮ For ICEs: internal modiﬁcation ok
Problems:
◮ Evidence for ambiguity?
◮ For IPh: expletive semantics (as in version 3 of holistic idiomaticity)
plausibility of idomatic expletives?

Non-holistic idiomaticity, version 2
Represenatives: Nunberg et al. (1994) (for ICE)
Strengths:
◮ intuitive way to capture decomposability
Problems
◮ not incorporated into a formal theory

Idiomaticity: Partially holistic approach?
non-decomposable idioms: holistic analysis
decomposable idioms: non-holistic analysis
→ Combines the strengths of both analyses

Analytic challenge 2: Lexical fixedness
Lexical fixedness: Holistic approach?
individual words are fixed in the lexical entry
Tree Adjoining Grammar (Abeillé, 1995)

Holistic lexical ﬁxedness
Strengths:
◮ lexical ﬁxing at the level where the idiom is complete
◮
Problems:
◮ Idiom in non-canonical form: The beans seem to have been spilled.
◮ Pronominalization: . . . but they had only been spilled one by one.
◮ Idiomatic word use without the rest of the idiom: Pat pulled some strings, but
they weren’t useful.

Lexical fixedness: Non-holistic approach?
Lexically fixedness is enforced by co-occurrence mechanism
Mechanism:
◮ Version 1: selection (Krenn and Erbach, 1994)
◮ Version 2: collocation (Sailer, 2004)
What is required?
◮ lexeme-specific selection (Krenn and Erbach, 1994)
◮ selection of semantic predicates (Sailer, 2004)
◮ partial functions as denotations (Gazdar et al., 1985)

Analytic challenge 2: Lexical ﬁxedness Mechanism
Lexical ﬁxedness by selection
S
SPR
COMPS
1 NP
VP
SPR 1 NP
COMPS


V


SPR 1 NP
COMPS 2 NP



2 NP

Lexical fixedness by selection
Representatives: Krenn and Erbach (1994), Sag (2007)
Selection:
◮ head→complement (spill beans)
◮ head→specifier ()
◮ modifier→head (sattsam bekannt ‘known ad nauseam’)
Underlying selectional relation intact in raising, passive, topicalization
Strengths:
◮ uses a general mechanism of grammar
Problems:
◮ selected element requires selector: by rote
◮ general mechanism adequate for idiosyncratic behavior? (Variant:
L-selection, Everaert and Kuiper (1996))
◮ long selection chains: know on which side one’s toast is buttered (‘know
what’s going on’)

Lexical ﬁxedness by collocation
Representatives: Sailer (2004), Soehn (2009)
Collocations as a genuine lexeme-lexeme relation
No selectional relation among the collocates required
Problem
◮ rather vague notion, little formal theory of collocations

Analytic challenge 2: Lexical fixedness What is required?
Lexical fixedness by lexical identifyer
Each lexical item has an individual lexical identifier (LID)
Co-occurrence requirement stated in terms of LID.
Similar to the analysis of expletives in GPSG and HPSG (via special
NOMINAL-FORM specifications
Representatives: Krenn and Erbach (1994), Sag (2007), Soehn (2009)
Strengths:
◮ easy to encode
◮ LID useful for other things (selected preposition, expletives, ambiguous
words, . . . )
Problems
◮ LID as part of a word’s referential index (Krenn and Erbach, 1994): sattsam
bekanntes Problem (‘amply known problem’); pronominalization
◮ LID as part of a word’s morphosyntactic information (Soehn, 2009): raising;
pronominalization

Lexical ﬁxedness by semantic predicate
Similar to LID, but: requirement of a particular semantic constant
Representatives: Sailer (2004) (for ICE)
Strengths:
◮ more ﬂexible than the LID account with respect to syntactic construction
◮ semantic constants are needed independently
◮ pronominalization: possibly via anaphoric resolution at the discourse (see
next meeting)
Problems:
◮ not (reasonably) applicable to idiomatic phrases, expletives, . . .
◮ danger of recoding syntax/lexemes in the semantic representation

Lexical fixedness by partial functions
Combination of how and what
Represenative: Gazdar et al. (1985)
Semantic functions have partial denotation: spill-idiom is similar in
denotation to reveal, but only defined when applied to beans-idiom.
beans-idiom is similar in denotation to secret, but not in the domain of
any function other than spill-idiom
Strengths:
◮ nothing special needs to be assumed for idioms
◮ simple account for internal modification and syntactic and semantic flexibility
Problems:
◮ not reasonably applicable to idiomatic phrases
◮ severe consequences for the definition of the denotation functions (Pulman,
1993)
◮ not clear how to capture finer differences among ICEs

Lexical ﬁxedness: Partially holistic approach?
non-decomposable idioms:
decomposable idioms:

Analytic challenge 3: Syntactic fixedness
Data
Idiomatic phrases: syntactically irregular
kingdom come, by and large, trip the light fantastic
Idiomatic phrases: completely fixed:
kick the bucket
Idiomatic phrases: partially syntactically flexible (noncompositional
flexibility, Nunberg et al. (1994))
ins Gras beißen (‘bite the dust’, ‘die’)
Idiomatically combining expressions: passive, raising, tough, sometimes
topicalization; mobile idioms (Horn, 2003); syntactically connected ICEs
Idiomatically combining expressions: free occurrences; “metaphors”
(Horn, 2003); semantically connected ICEs

Syntactic ﬁxedness: Holistic approach?
Representatives: Weinreich (1969), Fraser (1970), Abeillé (1995)
Idiom is stored as a whole. Transformations are marked if applicable
Strengths:
◮ simple to encode
◮ takes idioms as units
Problems
◮ no insights on how decomposability and ﬂexibility might be connected
◮ meaning of the resulting construction does not play a role

Syntactic ﬁxedness: Non-holistic approach?
Flexibilty is regulated by the type of information that connects the idiom
parts
◮ syntactically irregular IPh: no treatment
◮ syntactically regular IPh: direct selectional requirement (Riehemann, 2001)
◮ syntactically connected ICE: lexeme requirement
◮ semantically connected ICE: semantic requirement
Strengths:
◮ relatively ﬂexible account
Problems:
◮ very heterogeneous

Syntactic ﬁxedness: Partially holistic approach?
Combination of both approaches:
◮ Fixed IPh: holistic account Flexible IPh and ICE: non-holistic account
Problems
◮ is there other evidence for a fundamental differences in the representation of
IPh and ICE?

Summary
(At least) 3 types of idioms
1 Idiomatic phrases: Syntactically (almost) frozen idioms, kick the bucket
2 Idiomatically combining expressions: Mobile idioms
a Syntactically connected idioms, spill the beans
b Semantically connected idioms, pull strings

Summary
References
Abeillé, Anne (1995). The Flexibility of French Idioms: A Representation with Lexical Tree
Adjoining Grammar. In M. Everaert, E.-J. v. d. Linden, A. Schenk, and R. Schreuder (Eds.),
Idioms. Structural and Psychological Perspectives, pp. 15–42. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,
Hillsdale.
Chafe, Wallace (1968). Idiomaticity as an Anomaly in the Chomskyan Paradigm. Foundations of
Language 4, 109–127.
Chomsky, Noam (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT
Press.
Egan, Andy (2008). Pretense for the Complete Idiom. Noûs 42(3), 381–409.
Ernst, Thomas (1981). Grist for the Linguistic Mill: Idioms and ‘Extra’ Adjectives. Journal of
Linguistic Research 1, 51–68.
Everaert, Martin and Kuiper, Koenraad (1996). Theory and Data in Idiom Research. In L. McNair
et al. (Ed.), CLS32: the Parasession on Theory and Data in Linguistics, Chicago, pp. 43–57.
Chicago Linguistic Society.
Fraser, Bruce (1970). Idioms within a Transformational Grammar. Foundations of Language 6,
22–42.
Gazdar, Gerald, Klein, Ewan, Pullum, Geoffrey, and Sag, Ivan (1985). Generalized Phrase
Structure Grammar. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Higgins, Francis Roger (1974). On the Use of Idioms as Evidence for Movement. A Cautionary
Note. Unpublished manuscript of a talk given at LSA 1974, New York.
Horn, George M. (2003). Idioms, Metaphors and Syntactic Mobility. Journal of Linguistics 39,
245–273.
Jackendoff, Ray (1975). Morphological and Semantic Regularities in the Lexicon.
Language 51(3), 639–671.Webelhuth, Sailer (Frankfurt) Idioms 1 2013 46 / 46

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