Heidi Harley: Idioms (reply to Martha McGinnis)

[Martha McGinnis]

Hi all --

>This sounds like a question for Higginbotham: wasn't he the one
>claiming that they should be distinguished?

yes -- and he pointed to the 'pre-event' vs 'mid-event'
readings of the progressive in each case as evidence that they
are significantly different. The paper of Mittwoch's that
Kate Kearns sent me the reference to, though, also
claims that they must be distinguished, hence the title --
and given your results with her 'stop' test, let's assume
she (and Jim) are right.

>>"Anita Mittwoch's (1991) paper 'In defence of
>>Vendler's achievements', Belgian Journal of Linguistics
>>vol 6, pp. 71-85 ... talks about the 'die/win the race' type,
>>and says that their progressives aren't like real
>>process progressives because they can't be modified by
>>continuative 'still' or be in complements to 'stop,
>>start, continue, keep' and so on."

>Accomplishments: in an hour, *for an hour, progressive, stop Ving
>Non-idiomatic: build the house
>
>(5)  I went to pieces in minutes.
>(6)??I went to pieces for minutes. (OK only with result-modification)
>(7)  I'm going to pieces again.
>(8)  I stopped going to pieces when Sue arrived.
>
>Others like this: make the grade, fall apart, lose one's marbles
>
>Progful achievements: in an hour, *for an hour, progressive, *stop Ving
>Non-idiomatic: win the race
>
>(9)   I found my feet in a month.
>(10)??I found my feet for a month. (OK only with result-modification)
>(11)  I'm still finding my feet.
>(12) *I stopped finding my feet when Sue arrived.
>
>Others like this: cross the Rubicon, bury the hatchet

These are great, although I'm definitely going to have to
go check out Mittwoch, since "still" ought not to be
compatible with real acheivements according to Kearns'
short description. But the 'stop'-test
looks like it works as advertised.

>I'm afraid I have no insights at all regarding Heidi's Big Question
>-- i.e., whether these six should be primitive aspectual classes, or
>just six of many, or six permutations of a smaller number of
>primitive classes.  But at least I think it's clear that idioms
>aren't aspectually 'special'.

hooray, thanks. So, I think then that Jim's got a problem with
progless acheivements; his account of the semantics of the
progressive only allows for progful ones, and he can't point
to 'idiomaticity' as artificially preventing progfulness.

I'm not really hoping for an answer to the Big Question at
this point;  I do ultimately think/hope that
most of these distinctions can be taken care of in the syntax, with
the merest handful of 'primitive' distinctions at issue (cf.
e.g my paper on denominal verbs and aktionsart in the 2nd MIT/Upenn
book), but the main point at hand was whether or not there
were such things as progful idioms -- if there really weren't,
that'd be trouble!

another interesting question is whether or not the 'idiomatic'
item always has the same basic aktionsart as the literal reading
of the verb or frame from which it's derived. it's not at first
obviously true for 'croak', because you can only croak idiomatically
once -- but as long as we say that THAT distinction between
idiomatic croaking and literal croaking is part of the Encylcopedia,
then both idiomatic croaking and literal croaking are
punctual (instantaneous, in the relevant sense). So maybe (and
hopefully, for a morphosyntactic theory of aktionsart) it
is true.

Anyway, that's probably a question for another day. thanks
very much, martha, for your tremendous examples and
discussion!

best, hh

>Cheers,
>Martha
>
>
>mcginnis at ucalgary.ca




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Heidi Harley
Department of Linguistics
Douglass 200E
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721
Ph: (520) 626-3554
Fax: (520) 626-9014
hharley at u.arizona.edu