Martin Everaert (Utrecht University)

Idioms in morphology: the role of the Encyclopedia in linguistic theorizing

(Note that this is a hybrid talk and will be available both on MS Teams, and, for those able to attend in person, in Drift 10, Room K(elder) 05 (in the building’s cellar) . As access to Drift 10 requires an access pass, please email us at syntax.interface@uu.nl in case you have difficulties entering)

We are used to describing idioms as phrases with a non-compositional semantics. When starting to work in idioms in morphology I thought we could apply the same mechanism. However, most morphologist seem to adhere to Aronoff’s ‘antidecompositionalism’ hypothesis: what happens inside lexemes is qualitatively different from what happens outside them (Aronoff 2007). Mostly the term ‘semantic idiosyncrasy’ is used, like Pesetsky (1985) who formulates ‘rules of idiosyncratic interpretation’ for syntax (= ‘idioms’ as we know them) and at the word-level.

I will reiterate (Everaert 2010) the argument that non-compositionality doesn’t help you to determine what idioms are, and that it fits in, I think, with Dowty’s illuminating discussion of idioms in morphology (Dowty 1979). Subsequently I will discuss the way idioms are addressed in Distributed Morphology (DM). In DM the Encyclopedia is the repository for ‘special’, partly non-linguistic meanings. I will argue that if the Encyclopedia is the place for encoding non-linguistic knowledge, quite a lot becomes part of the Encyclopedia, whether one wants to call it idiomatic or not. Thus, being listed in the Encyclopedia comes close to what Hockett (1958) calls an idiom (but I am quite sure that that is not wat DM wants to hear). The encyclopedia seems to be an extensionally defined set of primitives; it encodes knowledge of actual language use, and as such should not be considered part of the object of inquiry in generative grammar: I-language. But I will argue that it is precisely where idioms, both in morphology and syntax, belong, it is an E-language phenomenon (Chomsky 1986).

Aronoff, Mark. 2007. “In the Beginning was the Word.” Language 83: 803-830.

Chomsky, Noam. 1986. Knowledge of Language. Its Nature, Origin, and Use. New York: Praeger

Dowty, David 1979. Word Meaning and Montague Grammar. Dordrecht: Kluwer

Everaert, Martin. 2010. “The Lexical Encoding of Idioms.” In Syntax, Lexical Semantics, and Event Structure, edited by Malka Rappaport Hovav, Edith Doron, and Yvi Sichel, 76-99. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hockett, Charles. 1958. A course in modern linguistics. New York: Macmillan.

Pesetsky, David. 1985. Morphology and Logical Form. Linguistic Inquiry 16(2), 193-246