The syntactic literature on idioms contains some proposals that are surprising from a compositional perspective. For example, Sportiche (2005) and Cecchetto and Donati (2015) propose that, in the case of verb-object idioms, the verb combines directly with the noun inside its DP complement, and the determiner is introduced higher up in the syntactic structure, or is late-adjoined. This seems to violate compositionality insofar as it is generally assumed that the semantic role of the determiner is to convert a noun to the appropriate semantic type to serve as the argument to the function denoted by the verb. In this paper, we establish a connection between this line of analysis and lines of work in semantics that have developed outside of the domain of idioms, particularly work on incorporation and a mixed formal and distributional semantic model developed in McNally (2017); McNally and Boleda (2017). This semantic work separates the composition of descriptive content from that of discourse referent introducing material; our proposal shows that this separation offers a particularly promising way to handle the compositional difficulties posed by idioms, including certain patterns of variation in intervening determiners and modifiers.

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No 715154), grant FFI2016-76045-P (AEI/MINEICO/FEDER, UE), a Salvador de Madariaga mobility grant from the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports, an ICREA Academia award, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.