Aspectual Composition in Idioms

Idiomatic utterances contribute by virtue of their aspectual class to the temporal structure of discourse – hence it is essential that theories of aspect derivation and discourse structure should encompass them. A recent claim has been made (McGinnis 2002) that the aspectual class of idiomatic expressions can be derived compositionally, by the same process as in literal language. We examine this claim carefully, and show that while aspect may in principle be derived compositionally at least in one class of idioms, Nunberg, Sag and Wasow’s ‘idiomatically combining expressions’, this does not mean that an expression will necessarily have the same aspectual class on both an idiomatic and a literal interpretation. We present examples of expressions where aspect differs between these interpretations, and we explain this in terms of the differing inputs to the process of aspectual composition in the idiomatic and literal cases. By employing a notion of aspectual composition which includes thematic relations (Krifka 1992), and allowing for the fact that the thematic relations in question may differ between the idiomatic and the literal interpretations of a given expression, we can explain the mismatch between aspectual class in the idiomatic and literal interpretations, while maintaining that the broad process of aspectual composition is the same in both cases. Certain idioms, however those identified by Nunberg, Sag and Wasow as ‘idiomatic phrases’ – may best be regarded not as undergoing aspectual composition but as being listed as phrases in the lexicon with their aspectual information attached.