The Minimalist Syntax of Idioms by Will Alexander Nediger A dissertation submitte

165 Pages·2017·1.36 MB·English

by  Will Nediger

Unifying Structure-Building in Human Language: The Minimalist Syntax of Idioms
by
Will Alexander Nediger

A dissertation submitted in partial requirement
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
(Linguistics)
in the University of Michigan
2017

Doctoral committee:
Professor Acrisio Pires, Chair
Professor Marlyse Baptista
Professor Samuel D. Epstein
Associate Professor Ezra Keshet
Professor Richard L. Lewis
Townspeople in the process of literally painting the town red (High Plains Drifter, 1973)
Will Alexander Nediger
[email protected]
ORCID iD: 0000-0002-2406-3140

© Will Alexander Nediger 2017
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost, thanks are due to my indefatigable advisor, Dr. Acrisio Pires, without
whom none of this would have been possible. Acrisio’s dedication to his students and
tirelessness have always struck me as superhuman. Thanks, too, to the rest of my committee
members – Dr. Marlyse Baptista, Dr. Sam Epstein, Dr. Ezra Keshet, and Dr. Rick Lewis – all of
whom have provided me with numerous insights or encouraging words over the years.
Thanks to my fellow grad students, who have become my second family and who never
fail to brighten my day. I won’t list everyone, since I will inevitably leave somebody out, but you
know who you are. This is also the point at which I would traditionally include a litany of inside
jokes, did I not find that practice so distasteful. But I would be remiss not to give a shoutout to
my inimitable cohort-mate, Batia Snir, who has been a steady and comforting presence over the
last six years.
Thanks to the Quizbowl community for providing a wonderful network of friends, and
for ensuring that I didn’t retreat into the ivory tower and spend all my time learning increasingly
obscure syntactic formalisms, and that I spent some of my time learning increasingly obscure
facts about the works of Kobo Abe instead.
Finally, thanks to my family for supporting and occasionally attempting to understand my
linguistic endeavors. Thanks most of all to Lorraine, the newest official member of my family,
whose importance to me I can’t possibly express in mere words.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii
LIST OF FIGURES vi
ABSTRACT vii

CHAPTER
1. Introduction 1
1.1. What is an idiom? 1
1.2. Why are idioms interesting? 2
2. Issues in the Syntax-Semantics Interface 9
2.1. Introduction 9
2.2. Early generative grammar 9
2.3. Minimalism 12
2.4. Parallel architecture 15
2.5. Distributed Morphology 17
2.6. Summary 21
3. Previous Approaches to Idioms 22
3.1. Early generative grammar 22
3.2. Nunberg, Sag and Wasow (1994) 24
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3.3. Jackendoff (1997, 2002, 2011) 30
3.4. Distributed Morphology 33
3.5. Non-generative approaches 35
3.6. Summary 38
4. Syntactic Structure and Syntactic Flexibility of Idioms 40
4.1. Internal syntactic structure of idioms 40
4.2. Apparent differences in the syntactic flexibility of idioms 42
4.2.1. Topicalization 43
4.2.2. Passiviziation 48
4.2.3. Pronominalization 58
4.2.4. Adjectival modification 65
4.2.5. Head movement 70
4.3. Summary 73
5. The Architecture of the Language Faculty 75
5.1. Lexical storage of idioms 75
5.2. Matching 80
5.2.1. Matching vs. Unification and late insertion 83
5.3. Spell-Out 86
5.4. Sample derivations 92
5.5. Semantic interpretation 96
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5.6. Syntactically idiosyncratic idioms 101
5.7. Some outstanding issues 107
5.7.1. McCawley’s paradox 107
5.7.2. Decomposable but inflexible idioms 111
5.8. The demarcation problem 113
5.9. Aktionsart 115
5.10. Summary 119
6. A Quantitative Study of Decomposability and Flexibility Judgments 120
6.1. Background 120
6.2. Methodology 123
6.2.1. Experiment 1: Decomposability norming 123
6.2.2. Experiment 2: Flexibility judgment 124
6.3. Results and discussion 124
6.4. General discussion 129
6.5. Summary 131
7. Summary 132

APPENDIX 140
BIBLIOGRAPHY 146

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 3.1: Sign for spill (non-idiomatic) 29
Figure 3.2: Sign for spill (idiomatic) 29
Figure 5.1: Banyan tree for pull X’s leg 79
Figure 6.1: Mean response by condition for Experiment 1 126
(Cond 1: Decomposable/flexible vs Cond 2: Non-decomposable)
Figure 6.2: Mean response by condition for Experiment 1 127
(Cond 1: Decomposable/flexible vs Cond 3: Decomposable/inflexible)
Figure 6.3: Mean response by condition for Experiment 1 128
(Cond 1: Decomposable/flexible vs Cond 4: Proverbs)
Figure 6.4: Decomposability ratings (Experiment 1) 129
vs Mean flexibility ratings (Experiment 2)
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ABSTRACT

Idioms have traditionally posed difficulties for different syntactic frameworks, because
they behave in some senses like lexical items but in other senses like syntactically complex
phrases. In particular, despite showing evidence of having internal syntactic structure, they have
apparently limited syntactic flexibility relative to non-idiomatic phrases. This dissertation
proposes a Minimalist architecture which makes a sharp distinction between the lexicon and the
syntax, but nonetheless accounts for the hybrid properties of idioms. I argue that idioms, like
non-idiomatic structures, are built by iterative application of Merge, preserving the Minimalist
notion that there is a single basic structure-building operation, Merge, in natural language.
However, idioms are also stored wholesale in the lexicon in the form of syntactic structures with
associated phonological and semantic representations. These lexically stored idioms do not serve
as input to structure building through Merge. Rather, if the syntactic derivation builds a structure
which matches a lexically stored idiom, then that structure may optionally be interpreted via the
lexically stored idiom meaning.
Given my proposal that all idioms are built by means of Merge, I analyze extensive
evidence for syntactic flexibility across different types of idioms, and argue that the apparent
limitations on the syntactic flexibility of idioms can be explained without positing any idiom-
specific restrictions. Rather, I explain how the conceptual-intentional interface imposes
independent semantic restrictions that constrain the syntactic derivation of particular idioms,
accounting for distinctions that include the much-discussed contrast between decomposable
idioms (whose meaning is distributed among their parts, e.g. spill the beans, in which spill can be
paraphrased as ‘divulge’ and beans can be paraphrased as ‘secret’) and non-decomposable
idioms (whose meaning is not distributed among their parts, e.g. kick the bucket, in which no
independent meaning can be identified for kick or bucket). The semantic representations I
propose for non-decomposable idioms are associated with their entire lexically stored structure,
unlike those for decomposable idioms. This distinction interacts with independent semantic
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constraints to explain the apparently limited syntactic flexibility of non-decomposable idioms
relative to decomposable idioms. This approach extends to idioms a unified structure-building
procedure for natural language, while explaining the linguistic properties of idioms in a
principled way, consistent with Minimalist assumptions.

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