It has recently been claimed that aspect is compositional in idioms, just as it is in literal language (McGinnis 2002). We show that, although this is true for many idioms, there appear to be a number of interesting exceptions. We present examples of idiomatic expressions where aspect is not derived compositionally-or at least, not in McGinnis's sense. Many (but not all) of these exceptions fall into a class described by Jackendoff (1997a) as 'fake object resultatives'. We draw some tentative conclusions about the nature and classification of those idioms which show apparent noncompositionality of aspect. Furthermore, we suggest that such idioms might be regarded as aspectually compositional, if aspectual composition is taken to include as part of its input Krifka's (1992) 'thematic relations'.

We illustrate how the use of metaphorical views for reasoning with metaphor requires the mapping of information such as event shape, event rate and mental/emotional states from the source domain to the target domain. Such mappings are domain-independent and can be implemented by means of rules we call View Neutral Mapping Adjuncts (VNMAs). We give a list of the main VNMAs that appear to be required, and show how they can be incorporated into a pre-existing system (ATT-Meta) for metaphorical reasoning.

We consider the varieties and directions of influence that the source and target domains involved in a conceptual metaphor can have on each other during the course of understanding metaphorical utterances based on the metaphor. Previous studies have been restricted both as to direction of influence and as to type of influence. They have been largely confined to the "forward" (source to target) direction of influence, and they have concentrated on the transfer of features or propositions and (to some extent) the highlighting of aspects of a domain. By contrast, this article stresses the importance both of other varieties of influence (e.g., transfer of queries and uncertainty effects) and of "reverse" influence (target to source). We seek to curb the natural tendency to think that, because metaphor involves an overall move from source to target, therefore all inter-domain influences in the course of understanding go in that direction. The bulk of the article explores the theoretical issues involved. These issues have arisen out of a reasoning-based approach to metaphor, seeking to make best use of information from metaphorical utterance, context, source and target domains, and known metaphorical mappings, by applying a complex overall reasoning process. The article briefly explains the thorough implementation of reverse influence in a computer program for metaphorical reasoning called ATT-Meta, although the theoretical considerations are relevant to all disciplines concerned with metaphor. We make some suggestions for further computational and psychological research on metaphor.2

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