Idioms and exceptionality
Nik Gisborne and Dick Hudson
LAGB Leeds September 2010
Idioms are exceptional
E.g. kick the bucket
• exception to general compositionality:
– it means ‘die’, not ‘kick the bucket’
• exception to general syntax:
– no passive: *The bucket was kicked.
– no tough movement: *The bucket was hard to
kick
– etc.
Our questions
• Why are such exceptions possible?
– Does default inheritance help?
• How are idioms stored in relation to their
constituent lexemes?
– Do the ‘sub-lexemes’ of Word Grammar help?
• How are idioms organized syntactically?
– Does dependency structure help?
– Do we need phrases?
Kinds of idiom
Nunberg, Sag and Wasow 1994 distinguish:
• ‘idiomatic phrases’(IdP)
– e.g. kick the bucket
– rigid syntax
• ‘idiomatically combining expressions’ (IdCE)
– e.g. bury the hatchet
– some syntactic freedom
• e.g. The hatchet was buried.
More recent research in linguistics
Nunberg at al’s contrast has been explored:
• George Horn (2003): IdCEs are syntactically
regular if the parts have regular theta roles.
• Espinal & Mateu (2010): IdP vs IdCE is too rigid,
e.g. laugh ones head off is part IdP, part IdCE.
• Jackendoff (1997, 2008): accepts IdP vs IdCE.
– Influential player.
– Suggests a formal analysis.
IdP or IdCE?
• Is it likely that there are just two kinds of
idiom?
• Maybe there are degrees of opacity?
– most opaque, e.g. kick the bucket
– less opaque, e.g. bury the hatchet
– least opaque, e.g. laugh ones head off
• But how to measure opacity?
– Does a network analysis help?
Jackendoff: an IdP
Doesn’t contribute
at all to meaning.
NB special role of
head word!
Jackendoff: An IdCE
NB This is the
only link between
bury and the
hatchet.
Jackendoff’s analysis
• IdP: totally rigid syntax
– but: kicked the proverbial bucket
• IdCE: totally free syntactic order
– but: *They found the hatchet then buried it.
– and excludes: buried the proverbial hatchet
• IdCE: requires meaning:syntax = 1:1
– e.g. bury (‘reconcile’) the hatchet (‘a
disagreement’)
‘Metaphorical semantic
composition’
Metaphorical semantic composition
• Isn’t sufficient for IdCE
– raise (‘cause’) hell (‘disturbance’) isn’t an
IdCE (Postal).
• Isn’t necessary for IdCE
His example!
– let (‘reveal’) the cat (‘the secret’) out of the bag
(??)
• Isn’t necessary for literal meaning
– do (‘cartwheel’) a cartwheel (‘cartwheel’)
Research in psycholinguistics (1)
• How does activation affect idioms?
• How are idioms represented?
– NOT as single words
– But as phrases with a single entry
• ‘The hybrid theory’
– Cutting and Bock (1997)
– Superlemma theory (Sprenger et al 2006)
Cutting and Bock (1997)
Syntax is
independent of
words.
Superlemmas
Shows syntactic
relations among
parts. (But how?)
NB model of
activation, not
structure.
Research in psycholinguistics (2)
• We access conceptual metaphors in idioms.
– e.g. ‘anger is heat’ for blow one’s stack , but not jump
down someone’s throat
– Gibbs, Bogdanovich, Sykes and Barr (1998)
• We process idiom syntax normally.
– Peterson, Burgess, Dell and Eberhard (2001)
• Literal word meanings become active during
idiom production.
– Sprenger, Levelt and Kempen (2006).
To summarise, …
•
•
•
•
Idioms have a single entry in memory.
They contain ordinary lexemes.
They involve ordinary metaphor.
They have ordinary syntax.
– But abnormal linkage to meaning
– So syntax may be abnormally limited.
Word Grammar
1984
1990
2007
2010
Part 1: How the mind works
Part 2: How language works
Part 3: How English works
2010
What Word Grammar offers
• Default inheritance
– allows exceptions
• Sub-lexemes
– allows partial differences within a lexeme
• Dependency structure
– allows words to relate directly
• Network structure
– explains spreading activation and relatedness
For example: tall man
height
tall man
> 1.75m
referent
height
> typical
height
sense
TALL
1.75m
man
sense
‘isa’
MAN
stored type/lexeme
dependent
tall
man
token
sense
Default inheritance allows
exceptions
I.e. instances may have exceptional properties
• e.g. tall overrides the default height.
• Typically, a dependent enriches the head’s
sense.
– and may override default properties.
– Any property can be overridden.
• e.g. fake diamonds just look like diamonds
So exceptionality ranges …
• from zero
– kick a ball
[cf morphology: walked]
• through partial
– kick up a fuss
[cf vowel-change: ran]
• to total
– kick the bucket
[cf suppletion: went]
Theoretical point
• Default inheritance is different from
unification.
– Unification is blocked by conflict.
• But default inheritance is widely accepted
in AI models of cognition.
• And it explains the prototype effects found
by psychologists.
Sub-lexemes
• Lexemes are in a conceptual taxonomy:
– e.g. TAKE isa full verb isa verb isa word
• Each word token isa some lexeme.
• So ‘sub-lexeme isa lexeme’ is permitted
– e.g. TAKE/off isa TAKE isa verb …
– like TAKE: TAKE/off inflects to took
– unlike TAKE: TAKE/off is intransitive and …
Sub-lexemes in idioms
• KICK/bucket isa KICK
• Syntax:
– like KICK: it needs an object
– unlike KICK: this must be THE/bucket
• whose complement must be BUCKET/the
• Semantics:
– unlike KICK, its sense is ‘die’.
pace Jackendoff …
who rejects this kind of analysis:
• 1997:
– “a notational variant of listing a lexical VP”
– “clumsy” … “collapses under its own weight”
• 2008:
– “no non-theory-internal reason to concentrate
all the meaning in one morpheme”
• but his own analysis locates meaning on head!
Jackendoff: an IdP
NB special role of
head word!
NB ‘die’ is separated from
‘kick’ by many links.
NB direct link from
‘create a disturbance’
to ‘kick’
Two idioms in Word Grammar
kick
die
sense
sense
KICK
create dust
sense
create a
disturbance
c
KICK/up
•
o
c NB link from ‘fuss’
to ‘disturbance’ (not o
KICK/bucket
•
•
shown)
KICK/fuss
THE BUCKET
UP
sense
c
•
•
A/fuss FUSS/a
IdPs and IdCEs in WG
•
•
•
IdPs and IdCEs use ordinary syntax.
Their head words have exceptional senses.
The network shows how close the idiomatic
sense is to the literal sense.
–
•
So there’s no need for any other IdP/IdCE contrast.
We speakers can vary the syntax as we want.
–
But there’s no point in varying it if the parts are
unrelated to the idiomatic meaning.
Conclusion
• The IdP/IdCE contrast has no theoretical
status.
• The range of possibilities found is as
expected given:
–
–
–
–
default inheritance
sub-lexemes for syntactic and semantic detail
dependents as semantic modifiers
network structure
Thank you
• This slide show can be found at
www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/talks.htm