Idioms and extended transducers

There is a tension between the idea that idioms can be both listed in the lexicon, and the idea that they are themselves composed of the lexical items which seem to inhabit them in the standard way. In other words, in order to maintain the insight that idioms actually contain the words they look like they contain, we need to derive them syntactically from these words. However, the entity that should be assigned a special meaning is then a derivation, which is not the kind of object that can occur in a lexicon (which is, by definition, the atoms of which derivations are built), and thus not the kind of thing that we are able to assign meanings directly to. Here I will show how to resolve this tension in an elegant way, one which bears striking similarities to those proposed by psychologists and psycholinguists working on idioms.