The meaning of an idiomatic expression cannot be transparently worked out from the meanings of its constituent words due to its figurative and unpredictable nature. Consequently, the syntactic composition and the structural paradigm of an idiomatic expression are supposed to be the same in every context. However, this is not the case in the institutionalized second language varieties of English...

a growing number of recent studies on verbal meaning have demonstrated that positing a direct mapping between (lexical/logical) semantics and syntax with respect to event structure can account for numerous linguistic phenomena. in this article, we demonstrate that certain facts in persian can only be explained by decomposing verbs into smaller syntactic pieces that reflect subparts of a complex...