Let’s Paint the Town Red for a Few Hours:
Composition of Aspect in Idioms
Sheila R. Glasbey
School of Computer Science
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham B15 2TT, UK
S.R.Glasbey@cs.bham.ac.uk
                            Abstract
It has recently been claimed that as-
pect is compositional in idioms, just
as it is in literal language (McGinnis
2002). We show that, although this
is true for many idioms, there appear
to be a number of interesting excep-
tions. We present examples of idio-
matic expressions where aspect is
not derived compositionally – or at
least, not in McGinnis’s sense.
Many (but not all) of these excep-
tions fall into a class described by
Jackendoff (1997a) as ‘fake object
resultatives’. We draw some tenta-
tive conclusions about the nature
and classification of those idioms
which show apparent non-
compositionality of aspect.  Fur-
thermore, we suggest that such idi-
oms might be regarded as
aspectually compositional, if aspec-
tual composition is taken to include
as part of its input Krifka’s (1992)
‘thematic relations’.
1 Aspectual class of idioms
Consider the idiomatic verb phrase ‘paint the town
red’ (meaning, according to the Longman Diction-
ary of Idioms (1979), “have a very enjoyable time,
esp. in a lively and noisy manner”). This phrase,
according to our intuitions, and examples found in
a web search using the Google© search engine,
combines readily with temporal for-adverbials to
form sentences such as:
1. Mary and her friends painted the town red for a
few hours [id].
(Note: ‘[id]’ conveys that ‘paint the town red’ here
receives an idiomatic interpretation.)
 An example found in the web search is:
2. Board the Chiva Arubanita Party Bus … and
paint the town red for six hours [id].
(http://travel.discovery.com/destinations/fodors/aru
ba/tips.html, consulted 6/05/03).
‘Paint the town red’ does not, however, combine
readily with temporal in-adverbials, making (3)
difficult or impossible to interpret:
3. ?? Mary and her friends painted the town red
in a few hours1 [id].
According to standard tests for aspectual class (see,
e.g., Vendler 1967, Dowty 1979), this shows that
the eventuality described by ‘Mary and her friends
                                                          
1 We ignore here the inceptive reading where ‘in a few
hours’  measures the time between some contextually
defined instant and the beginning of the painting.
painted the town red’ 2 is an activity rather than an
accomplishment. Now compare a literal interpreta-
tion of ‘paint the town red’ .
1a.   ? Mary and her friends painted the town red
        for a few hours [lit].
(Note: ‘[lit]’  conveys that ‘paint the town red’  is
here interpreted literally.)
Since it may be difficult for the reader to ignore the
idiomatic interpretation and focus on the literal
one, we will replace ‘red’  in (1a) by ‘green’ . In
order to make the scenario more plausible, we will
also replace ‘town’  by ‘shed’ , assuming that the
aspectual class of the eventuality described by the
literally-interpreted sentence is not thereby af-
fected.
1b.   ? Mary and her friends painted the shed green
        for a few hours [lit].
It is now clear that (1b) is unacceptable or at best
marginal. (1c), on the other hand, is perfectly ac-
ceptable:
1c.   Mary and her friends painted the shed green in
        a few hours [lit].
‘Mary and her friends painted the town/shed
red/green’ , on a literal interpretation, is clearly,
therefore, a description of an accomplishment and
not an activity. Thus we have an example of a
phrase which, when interpreted literally, has a dif-
ferent aspectual class from when it is interpreted
figuratively, contra (McGinnis 2002). Since the
aspect conveyed by the literal interpretation is pre-
sumably derived by the usual process of aspectual
composition (as described by Krifka 1992, Smith
1991 and others), we may conclude, at least for the
time being, that the aspectual class conveyed by
the idiomatic interpretation is non-compositional,
i.e. not derived by the usual process of aspectual
composition. According to this process, the aspec-
tual class of the eventuality described by the full
sentence is derived by combining properties of the
verb, its tense (etc.), its object argument(s), any
                                                          
2 We take aspectual class to be a property of eventuali-
ties – an eventuality being a cover term for an event or
state.
specified resultative state (‘green’  in (1c)), its sub-
ject argument, any adverbial modifiers and various
‘thematic relations’  between the object and the
eventuality (see later). An analysis such as that of
(Krifka 1992) predicts, correctly, that ‘Mary and
her friends painted the shed green’  describes an
accomplishment. McGinnis’ s claim is that the as-
pectual class of idiomatically-described eventuali-
ties is also compositional – thus ‘Mary and her
friends painted the town red’  would describe an
accomplishment. If McGinnis’ s claim were cor-
rect, then presumably the aspectual class would be
the same under an idiomatic interpretation as under
a literal interpretation (McGinnis 2002, p.668).
We have identified a number of other related
examples, all of which fall into the class described
by Jackendoff (1997a) as ‘fake object resultatives’ .
That is, syntactically they appear to be resultatives,
but the resultative state, on the idiomatic interpre-
tation, is not “real”. Examples include:
4. I cried my eyes out for some time and then I
went back to work.
(http://members.aol.com/wolfie1030/instinct.html,
consulted 30/4/03).
Clearly ‘I cried my eyes out’  describes an activity
(hence its compatibility with the for-adverbial).
Yet ‘I cried my eyes out’ , would, if taken as a lit-
erally-interpreted resultative, be expected to de-
scribe an accomplishment. That is, if aspectual
class were derived by the usual compositional pro-
cesses, we would expect an accomplishment.
However, no examples were found in a web search
in which ‘cried X’ s eyes out’  combines with a
temporal in-adverbial. Moreover, ‘I cried my eyes
out [id]’  fails other standard tests for accomplish-
ments (e.g. ‘??It took me two hours to cry my eyes
out [id].) Intuitively, the reason for this is that there
is no clearly defined, natural endpoint to an even-
tuality of (idiomatically) crying one’ s eyes out  –
there is no time point in the domain described by
the idiom which corresponds to the point at which,
in the domain described by the literal interpreta-
tion, one’ s eyes actually fall out as a result of the
crying. In order to be an accomplishment, of
course, an eventuality must have such a clearly
defined natural endpoint. The lack of such an end-
point makes the eventuality an activity instead. The
idiom  ‘to cry one’ s eyes out’  does not convey such
a natural endpoint – it simply means, according to
the Longman Dictionary of English Idioms, “to cry
a great deal”.3 Once again, then, we have a mis-
match between the aspectual class of the literally
described eventuality (henceforth ‘literal eventual-
ity’ ) and that of the idiomatically described even-
tuality (henceforth ‘idiom eventuality’ ).
     Similar observations are made with a number of
other idiomatic expressions, where in each case
corpus usage and speaker intuitions strongly sug-
gest an activity, while literal interpretation would
give rise to an accomplishment.
     Consider ‘sang X’ s heart out [id]’ . Examples
such as (5), found in the web search, show that this
idiom can be combined with temporal for-
adverbials.
5. Patsy sang her heart out for over two minutes.
(http://www.patsyclinehta.com/excerpts.htm,
 consulted 6/05/03).
No examples were found where ‘sang X’ s heart
out’  combines with a temporal in-adverbial, and
indeed such a construction sounds very odd:
6. ?? Patsy sang her heart out in two min-
utes/hours/days.
Once more, then, we have a construction which
describes accomplishments under a literal inter-
pretation, and activities under an idiomatic inter-
pretation.
     The idiomatic expressions ‘yelled X’ s head off’
and ‘poured X’ s heart out’  behave in a similar way.
But note that it may just about be acceptable to
say:
7. Patsy poured her heart out in two hours, on the
phone to her sister.
(We did not, however, find any such examples in
our web search.)
                                                          
3 As one of the reviewers for the ACL workshop points
out, expressions like ‘cry X’ s eyes out’  may be seen as
“conventionalized hyperbolae” or exaggerations.
     Why should (7), at least according to our intui-
tions, be marginally acceptable? We suggest that
the reason is that it may be possible to identify a
natural endpoint to the process of (idiomatically)
pouring out one’ s heart. Taking the idiom to mean
(following Longman) “to tell all one’ s personal
worries, problems, feelings, etc” then it is possible,
at least in principle, to see this process as having a
natural endpoint when all the worries, problems,
etc, have been expressed. Thus there is some
counterpart, in reality, to the contents of the suf-
ferer’ s figurative heart. This provides, in turn, a
counterpart to the end of the literal process of
pouring out the contents of  that heart. This may be
enough to make ‘pour X’ s heart out [id]’  describe,
at least in some contexts, an accomplishment, and
therefore be acceptable in combination with an in-
adverbial.
     All the examples considered so far have been
cases of Jackendoff’ s (1997a) class of ‘fake resul-
tatives’ .  There are other idioms, however, which
do not belong to this class and which also lack
compositionality of aspect.
     Consider the idiom ‘drive one’ s pigs to market’ ,
which means, according to Longman’ s dictionary,
“snore”. According to Krifka (1992) and others,
the presence of  the location adverbial ‘to market’ ,
pinpointing the destination or endpoint of the jour-
ney, makes ‘Fred drove his pigs to market’  de-
scribe an accomplishment. And indeed, if we take
the literal interpretation, then we can readily say:
8. Fred drove his pigs to market in two hours
[lit].
But (9) is not acceptable:
9. ?? Fred drove his pigs to market for two hours
[lit].
On the other hand, (8) is not good on the idiomatic
interpretation. If the sentence refers to Fred’ s
snoring, then (9), not (8), is acceptable. Thus we
have another example where the idiomatic inter-
pretation gives rise to an activity, while the literal
interpretation gives an accomplishment. We might
speculate at this point  (we return to this later) that
the reason for this may be that there is no counter-
part in reality to the destination described in the
pretence world as ‘to market’ . There is no inherent,
natural endpoint to the process of snoring.
     Interestingly, there is an idiom ‘saw logs’  that
means “ to sleep” , mentioned in (Nunberg, Sag &
Wasow 1994, p.497). Here, the aspectual class of
the eventuality described by ‘Fred sawed logs’  is
the same on both the literal and idiomatic inter-
pretations. In either case, ‘Fred sawed logs for two
hours’  is acceptable and  ‘Fred sawed logs in two
hours’  is not. Here, in both cases, we have an ac-
tivity. But the reason that the literal interpretation
gives an activity is because ‘logs’  is a bare plural –
the process of sawing logs (as opposed to that of
sawing six logs) does not have a natural endpoint.
Thus it appears, here, almost “ accidental”  that lit-
eral and idiomatic interpretations give the same
aspectual class.
     Another idiom where aspectual class does not
seem to be compositional is ‘drowned X’ s sor-
rows’ , which appears to describe an activity rather
than an accomplishment:
10. Fred drowned his sorrows for a few hours.
11. ??Fred drowned his sorrows in a few hours.
On our intuitions and those of our informants, (10)
is acceptable but (11) is not.
     Now compare ‘drowned X’ s rats4’ , interpreted
literally, which appears to describe an accom-
plishment:
12. ? Fred drowned his rats for a few hours.
13. Fred drowned his rats in a few hours.
Unfortunately we were unable to find any exam-
ples in our web search, so our claims here rest only
upon our own judgements and those of our infor-
mants. The majority of the latter agreed with us
finding (12) unacceptable, but a minority found
(12) marginal or even fully acceptable, on the as-
sumption that Fred had a large number of rats. This
is the reason for the single ‘?’  with which we label
(12).
     Taking the majority view, we have here another
example of non-compositionality of aspectual class
for an idiom. A similar “ explanation”  presents it-
self – there is no natural endpoint to the process of
                                                          
4 Apologies to rat lovers.
drowning one’ s sorrows, given that the idiom
means (according to Longman) “ to seek escape
from one’ s sadness, distress, etc., by drinking al-
cohol” . Unless we can envisage the drinking proc-
ess as having an inherent endpoint at which the
final sorrow disappears5, then drowning one’ s sor-
rows seems to describe an activity. This contrasts
with ‘drowning one’ s rats’ , where there is pre-
sumably a natural endpoint corresponding to the
ending of the life of the last rat.
     Although we have given a number of examples
of idioms with non-composition of aspect, we do
not wish to claim that there is a multitude of such
examples. Indeed, examples of idioms lacking
compositionality of aspect were not particularly
easy to find. The majority of idioms do appear to
show such compositionality. We now need an ex-
planation of why this should be the case, while also
accounting for the exceptions.
2  Towards an explanation
McGinnis (2002) claims that all idioms exhibit
compositionality of aspect. We have shown that
although many idioms do so, there is a significant
minority which do not.
     McGinnis takes the compositionality of idiom
aspect to support Halle and Marantz’ s (1993) the-
ory of Distributed Morphology (DM). DM uses
Levin and Rappaport Hovav’ s (1998) division of
meaning into two components – structural and
idiosyncratic, where the structural component in-
teracts with the syntax, and the idiosyncratic com-
ponent makes fine-grained distinctions irrelevant
to the syntax. In McGinnis’ s words (McGinnis
2002, p.667),  “ …[DM] maintains that the struc-
tural components of meaning are bundled into
lexical items manipulated by the syntax, while
idiosyncratic components are added post-
syntactically…  This … predicts that the syntactic
                                                          
5 This may just be possible, but on our judgement it is
stretching things. It would involve being able to “ count
one’ s sorrows”  and to envisage their being consumed,
as a gradual process (though not necessarily one by one)
as the drinking proceeds. Presumably one would then be
able to say, at a certain point ‘I have drowned all my
sorrows now’ . This does not seem impossible, but has
some feel of a joke about it, as though the idiom is be-
ing deliberately stretched too far.
derivation of idioms has semantic consequences.”
One of these consequences, McGinnis argues, is
that aspect is predicted to be compositionally de-
rived in idioms. In her words again (p.668), “ … it
predicts that even if a VP has a noncompositional
idiosyncratic meaning, it will have a compositional
structural meaning. Specifically, it will have the
same aspectual properties as any VP with the same
syntactic properties” .
     McGinnis contrasts DM with Jackendoff’ s
(1997b) theory of Representational Modularity
(RM), which treats idioms as involving an arbitrary
mapping between conceptual structure (CS) and
syntactic structure. RM has both structural and
idiosyncratic meaning encoded at CS, with the re-
sult that both type of meaning will be subject to
arbitrary mapping – thus predicting that aspect will
be non-compositional in idioms.
     If we are required to choose between RM and
DM, then the fact that most idioms appear to show
aspectual composition offers support for the former
theory. However, we are more concerned with the
need to account for the idioms we have identified
where aspect is not compositional. Let us now re-
turn to these exceptions and examine what is “ dif-
ferent”  about them.
     We remarked earlier that in the cases like ‘paint
the town red’ , we have an eventuality in the do-
main of literal interpretation (let us call this the
‘literal eventuality’ ) which has a natural endpoint
(the state of redness of the town), and a eventuality
in the domain of idiomatic interpretation (hence-
forth the ‘idiom eventuality’ ) which has no corre-
sponding natural endpoint. Further to this, we
observe that, not only does the literal eventuality
have a natural endpoint, but it has what Krifka
(1992) calls the gradual patient property, whereby
the progress of the eventuality corresponds to a
gradual change in the state of one of the partici-
pants of the eventuality – in this case the degree of
redness of the town. Roughly speaking, as the
painting proceeds, the town gets redder. There is
no corresponding gradual patient property in the
idiom eventuality. Now, according to Krifka’ s
(1992) account of aspectual composition, thematic
properties such as gradual patient are part of the
input to the process of aspectual composition. Such
properties explain why ‘Fred stroked the cat’  is an
activity, while ‘Fred washed the cat’  is an accom-
plishment. The subject NP, the object NP, and the
verb tense are identical in the two cases – all that is
different is the fact that washing the cat involves a
gradual change of state of the cat (towards a state
of cleanliness), whereas stroking the cat involves
no such gradual change.
     This may give us a way of “ rescuing”  the idea
that all idiom aspect is compositional. If we follow
Krifka in assuming that the input to the composi-
tional process involves not only properties of the
subject NP, object NP, verb, adverbials, etc, but
also thematic relations such as gradual patient,
then the latter may well be different in the idio-
matic interpretation of a phrase from that in the
literal interpretation. We have just seen this in the
case of ‘paint the town red’  – there is a gradual
patient relation in the literal interpretation but not
in the idiomatic one.
     Now, for many idioms, thematic relations may
well be the same in the idiomatic interpretation as
in the literal one. To take just one example:
14. Fred painted a bleak picture of the city.
This may, of course, be read literally or as an id-
iom. In either case, it appears to describe an ac-
complishment, given that we may add an in-
adverbial but not a for-adverbial on either inter-
pretation.
14a.  Fred painted a bleak picture of the city
         in/*for  a couple of hours [lit, id].
     In both cases there seems to be a gradual patient
relation between the state of completion of the
“ picture”  (be it a literal picture, say on a canvas, or
a verbal one) and the progress of the event of cre-
ating it.  It is interesting to note, too, that the pic-
ture exists in both cases – on the literal
interpretation there is a “ real”  picture, and on the
idiomatic interpretation there is something, such as
a verbal description, which is described as a pic-
ture. Contrast this with ‘paint the town red’  where
no equivalent of  “ the town”  exists on the idio-
matic interpretation.
     This suggests, returning to our earlier idea, that
the cases where the aspectual class of the idiom
eventuality corresponds to that of the literal even-
tuality are (at least roughly) those cases where
counterparts exist in the domain of idiomatic inter-
pretation to the objects in the domain of literal in-
terpretation, and where the thematic relations
between those objects and the eventuality are the
same in the literal and the idiomatic cases. These
cases appear to correspond with those idioms that
Nunberg, Sag and Wasow (1994) classify as idio-
matically combining expressions. These are idioms
“ whose parts carry identifiable parts of their idio-
matic meanings”  (p. 497ff). Nunberg, Sag and Wa-
sow give as an example ‘John was able to pull
strings to get the job’ , where ‘pull strings’  means
something like “ exploit personal connections” , and
‘pull’  can be seen to correspond to ‘exploit’  and
‘strings’  to ‘personal connections’ .6
     Idioms which do not have identifiable “ parts”  in
this way are called idiomatic phrases by Nunberg,
Sag and Wasow. They include expressions such as
‘saw logs’ , where there is no identifiable equiva-
lent in the domain of idiomatic interpretation to the
logs in the domain of literal interpretation. These
idioms, Nunberg, Sag and Wasow suggest, must be
entered in the lexicon as complete phrases. In gen-
eral, according to these authors, they cannot un-
dergo passivisation, topicalisation, ellipsis and
similar operations, as consequence of the fact that
they do not have identifiable semantic parts.  We
are suggesting that, for the same reasons, they do
not show compositionality of aspect.
     It seems, then, that we have found a way to
characterise those idioms which do not undergo
aspectual composition (or, at least, not in the sense
of McGinnis, where the aspectual class is the same
on the idiomatic interpretation as it is on the literal
one).
3 Conclusion
We may conclude that a certain class of idioms
show compositionality of aspect in the sense of
(McGinnis 2002) – meaning that the aspectual
class is the same on the idiomatic interpretation as
it is on the literal one. This class of idioms we may
tentatively identify as those that Nunberg, Sag and
Wasow (1994) call idiomatically combining ex-
pressions. (We need to be careful here, however,
as it is possible that there may be idioms which are
idiomatically combining expressions, but where
the thematic relations differ in the literal and idio-
                                                          
6 Nunberg, Sag and Wasow (1994) reject the term
‘compositional’ , used previously by them and others to
refer to such idioms, on the grounds that ‘composi-
tional’  has been interpreted in a variety of different
ways and may cause confusion.
matic interpretations. We are not clear at present
whether or not this may be the case – further work
is needed to investigate this.) Idioms which do not
belong to this class (the ones that Nunberg, Sag
and Wasow call idiomatic phrases) are able to de-
scribe eventualities of a different aspectual class
from the eventuality described in the literal inter-
pretation.  (Of course the aspectual classes may, as
we saw earlier, be the same, purely by coincidence.
This is true of ‘Fred sawed logs’ , which describes
an activity on both the literal and the idiomatic in-
terpretation.)
     We have also suggested that, if we take the pro-
cess of aspectual composition to include, as in
(Krifka 1992), thematic relations such as gradual
patient as its input, then idioms which are not
idiomatically combining expressions can also be
said to undergo aspectual composition. The differ-
ence here is that, because the thematic relations
may be different in the idiomatic interpretation
than in the literal interpretation, the result of the
aspectual composition may also be different. Thus,
although these idioms can be said to undergo as-
pectual composition, they will describe eventuali-
ties which have an aspectual class that may be
different from the aspectual class described on the
literal interpretation. This may have the interesting
consequence that, provided we identify the neces-
sary thematic relations for these idioms, we may
not need to list their aspectual class in the lexical
entry for the idiom, but instead we may be able to
derive their aspectual properties via the same kind
of compositional process as for the first class, the
idiomatically combining expressions. All that will
differ is the thematic relations. It will be necessary,
however, to explore this idea in more detail in fu-
ture work. Such work will need to involve the de-
tailed investigation of a wide range of idioms and
the exact process of their aspectual composition.

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