Idioms and the syntax/semantics interface of descriptive content vs. reference

Abstract

The syntactic literature on idioms contains some proposals that are surprising from a compositional perspective. For example, there are proposals 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 work that combines formal and distributional semantic modelling. 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.

(What) Can Deep Learning Contribute to Theoretical Linguistics?

“… See Dupre (2020),Guasti and Cardinaletti (2003), for cases 1 and 2 respectively.19 The 'learned exceptions' I discuss here are unlike what are typically called 'idioms' in the generative literature (see e.g Gehrke and McNally (2019)…”

The syntactic flexibility of German and English idioms: Evidence from acceptability rating experiments

“…Unicality can be seen as an extreme case of non-compositionality; it is thus important to check whether our conclusions hold up when a broader spectrum of idioms is tested. More generally, it could play a role for syntactic flexibility in how likely the DP is to occur with this verb and vice versa (conditional frequencies, as discussed by Müller & Englisch 2020) or whether DP and verb independently co-occur with similar words and phrases (similarity of semantic vectors, as discussed by Gehrke & McNally 2019). A related question is what role unicality plays in the categorization of an idiom as compositional or non-compositional.…”

Unified Representation for Non-compositional and Compositional Expressions

“…Effect of PIE Flexibility. We examine the impact of PIE's syntactic flexibility (or frozenness) (Constant et al, 2017;Gehrke and McNally, 2019) on PIER's performance. We analyze the PIE span detection performance with respect to the idiom fixedness levels.…”