Multiword Expressions and the Lexicon

Multiword expressions and the lexicon Jamie Y. Findlay Linacre College University of Oxford A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Hilary Term 2019 For my father. Acknowledgements It is a cliché to say that a project like this, in spite of only bearing a single name on the cover, was a collaborative effort, but that doesn’t stop it being true all the same. I have been very fortunate to have been supported at every stage of my academic career not only intellectually, but also emotionally and financially, and I only hope that this thesis goes some way to vindicating the generosity that has been so graciously bestowed on me. First and foremost, I must thank my supervisors, Ash Asudeh and Mary Dalrymple. Their intellectual influence can be felt throughout this thesis. They have made me a better linguist, a better writer, and a better thinker. Perhaps at least as importantly, though, I would like to thank them for all their other contributions to my well-being: for their encouragement, emotional support, career advice, and all the other things they have done for me that have made this work possible and have improved my life in inumerable ways. I really cannot imagine better supervisors, and I intend to spend the rest of my career striving to live up to the excellent example that they have set. Hearty thanks should also go to my two examiners, Tom Wasow and Stephen Pulman, for a lively and stimulating viva voce exam, and for their detailed and helpful comments, which have resulted in a much improved thesis. There are many others who have had an important hand in the intellectual development of this thesis: Doug Arnold, Sascha Bargmann, Alex Biswas, Kersti Börjars, Miriam Butt, Dag Haug, Stephen Jones, Ron Kaplan, Timm Lichte, Joey Lovestrand, John Lowe, Agnieszka Patejuk, Adam Przepiórkowski, Stephen Pulman, Manfred Sailer, Andy Spencer, Gert Webelhuth, and others here unnamed, to whom I can only apologise for the omission. Conversations, correspondences, and collaborations with these people have greatly improved the contents of this thesis, not to mention given me tremendous pleasure over the years. My love for linguistics was kindled as an undergraduate at Oxford, and my teachers there, especially Mary Dalrymple, deserve all the credit for starting me on this path. A special mention should also go to Chiara Capppellaro: she was my first tutor and I was her first student. It seems like a very long time indeed since that first essay on Saussure! Before I returned to Oxford to complete my MPhil, I spent a term at McGill, and there I had my eyes opened to a whole other world of linguistics. I would like to especially thank Alan Bale for giving me the best historical overview of 20th century syntactic theory I can imagine, and to Bernhard Schwarz for introducing me to the wonders of formal semantics. For much of my (fairly long) stint as a graduate student, I have been lucky enough to be funded by both the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and later also by Linacre College. Without this support it would have been impossible for me to pursue further study, and so I cannot express my gratitude sufficiently to these organisations for enabling me to do what I love every day. At Oxford, I have been fortunate enough to work with colleagues who I admire greatly, and who have been kind enough to share their guidance and expertise with me. Thanks go in particular to Kerstin Hoge, Matt Husband, Martin Maiden, and Louise Mycock. I have also had the privilege of making many fine friends along the way, and they have been invaluable in keeping me sane and making this whole endeavour more fun than it has any right to be: Alex Biswas, Stephen Jones, Yoolim Kim, Marjolein Poortvliet, Ana Werkmann Horvat, you have all been amazing. Of course, I also made the finest of friends, my partner, Alicia Cleary-Venables, whose blood, sweat, and tears are in this thesis almost as much as mine. All of this faffing around with books and words started before I got to university, of course, and my family deserve the heartiest thanks of all, for everything that they have done and continue to do for me. My grannie, Joy, and my aunt, Tracey, have always been my staunchest supporters, and I know they will be breathing a sigh of relief now that this thesis is done. My mum always pushed me to do my best, and always showed me the love and belief I needed to succeed. Any intellectual worth I may have picked up over the years owes its origins to her. Finally, I want to thank my dad, who, although he may not have always understood what I was doing, was nonetheless unwavering in his support and in his pride. Crushingly, he passed away during the final stages of this project, and so he never got to see it completed. This thesis is dedicated to him. Abstract The term ‘multiword expression’ (MWE) refers to a diverse group of linguistic phenomena connected by the fact that they do not fit neatly into the word-phrase dichotomy: like phrases, they appear to be made up of multiple words; but, like words, they have idiosyncrasies (of meaning, form, or both) which must be learned. Examples include idioms, like spill the beans, ‘reveal the secrets’; prepositional verbs, like rely on; or light verb constructions, like have a break. Such expressions are of interest to linguistic theory because they straddle the boundary between the productive and idiosyncratic components of language, i.e. between what is (or can be) computed and what must be memorised. The thesis begins by investigating a number of properties of MWEs which any theory must give an account of: for example, they can be idiomatic in a variety of ways, such as by having unpredictable meanings, containing words which do not appear outside of the expression (run amok), or having a syntactic structure not attested elsewhere (by and large); they are also variably flexible, sometimes allowing modification (they spilled the financial beans), passivisation (the beans were spilled), or extraction (the beans that they spilled); and they have a specific psycholinguistic profile: idioms are processed faster than compositional phrases. A theory of MWEs has to give an account of how the more idiomatic properties square with the more productive ones. This thesis aims to do just that. It is argued that there are essentially four families of theory one might entertain: one which treats MWEs as big words, one which treats them as phrases which are composed of special versions of the words they contain, one which obtains a literal parse of the phrase first and then translates the literal meaning into the idiomatic one, and one which treats them as stored phrases which possess internal structure. The first approach treats MWEs as wholly word-like (i.e. as atomic units), and the next two treat them as wholly phrase-like (i.e. as composed of smaller independent units). It is only the fourth which takes the tension inherent in MWEs seriously, recognising that they are units in their own right, but also have internal structure. I argue, therefore, that this is the kind of theory we should prefer. The proposal I develop hinges formally on the use of a Tree-Adjoining Grammar (TAG), a tree-rewriting formalism which allows us to store (internally structured) phrases as elementary objects. This is integrated into the architecture of Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), replacing the usual context-free grammar used there. By treating TAG elementary trees as descriptions, we are able to reduce LFG lexical entries to nothing but a set of constraints (on all levels of linguistic structure). The resulting framework has a number of attractive properties: it inherits from LFG the ability to separate configurational from functional information in the syntax, and gains from TAG a natural capacity to represent MWEs, and the ability to ‘lexicalise’ the grammar (associate every elementary structure with a lexical item), which I argue is a desirable property for a lexicalist theory like LFG. Because of this last result, I call the theory Lexicalised LFG. Contents List of Figures xiii List of Tables xvii 1 Introduction 1 1.1 What is a word? . 2 1.2 Mismatches between the different conceptions of ‘word’ . 4 1.3 Multiword expressions . 5 1.4 Outline of the thesis . 9 2 Multiword expressions 11 2.1 MWEs or constructions? . 12 2.1.1 Formal and substantive constructions . 13 2.1.2 Lexical integrity . 16 2.1.3 Summary . 20 2.2 Properties of MWEs . 21 2.2.1 Semantic idiomaticity . 21 2.2.2 Syntactic idiomaticity . 22 2.2.3 Lexical idiomaticity . 23 2.2.4 The real words problem . 24 2.2.5 Morphosyntactic flexibility . 25 2.2.6 Syntactic flexibility . 26 2.2.7 Decomposability . 35 2.2.8 Psycholinguistic properties . 41 2.2.9 Extended uses of idioms . 43 2.3 Chapter summary . 47 3 Approaches to MWEs 49 3.1 The monolexemic approach . 50 3.2 The space of possibilities . 55 3.3 Lexical ambiguity . 58 3.3.1 Strengths of the lexical ambiguity approach . 59 3.3.2 The collocational challenge . 60 ix x Contents 3.3.3 Non-decomposable MWEs . 67 3.3.4 Other weaknesses . 74 3.3.5 Summary . 76 3.4 One-to-many lexical entries . 77 3.5 Semantic mapping . 78 3.5.1 Strengths of the semantic mapping approach . 82 3.5.2 Weaknesses of the semantic mapping approach . 88 3.5.3 Extended uses of idioms .

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