Clitic incorporation and abstract semantic objects in idiomatic constructions

This paper analyses inherent clitics of idiomatic constructions as verbal arguments (Jelinek 1984, Baker 1996, Hale 2003) that are translated as free variables (Delfitto 2002): they are anaphoric to a (hidden) non-referential discourse topic or (right) dislocated constituent. Furthermore, since they denote abstract semantic objects (Asher 1993), they are assumed to be semantically incorporated into the verb to which they are affixed at the syntax-semantics interface (Van Geenhoven 1998), either by unification of selecting features or by predicate modification of some role function of the event under consideration (Farkas and Swart 2003, Dayal 2003). Whereas noun incorporation is a salient property of polysynthetic languages (as has been extensively argued in the linguistic literature; Mardirussian 1975, Mithun 1984), in this paper the incorporation of clitics and nouns is argued to be a covert phenomenon of nonpolysynthetic languages, specifically in idiomatic constructions (Espinal 2001).