On the Systematic Aspect of Idioms

It has traditionally been assumed that the meaning of some or all phrasal idioms is noncompositional. However, I will 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 will show that this observation supports the theory of Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1994). 1 Aspectual Classes of Idioms First, it is worth noting that all aspectual classes contain idiomatic VPs. In what follows, I will assume the familiar Vendlerian classes (states, activities, achievements, and accomplishments), identified by an array of tests from the literature (see Vendler 1967, Dowty 1979, Mittwoch 1991, among many others). Subclasses of achievements and accomplishments will also be distinguished. However, the aspectual parallelism between idiomatic and non-idiomatic VPs is independent of this classification. States and activities are atelic predicates, which can be modified by adverbial PPs with for, but not by adverbial PPs with in, at least not with the sense that the state of affairs denoted by the VP ends in the time specified: (1) a. Harry knew the truth for years/#in an hour. ATELIC