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<Paper uid="W03-1406">
  <Title>Let's Paint the Town Red for a Few Hours: Composition of Aspect in Idioms</Title>
  <Section position="4" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
3 Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> 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 expressions. (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 idio6 Nunberg, Sag and Wasow (1994) reject the term 'compositional' , used previously by them and others to refer to such idioms, on the grounds that 'compositional' has been interpreted in a variety of different ways and may cause confusion.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> 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 describe eventualities of a different aspectual class from the eventuality described in the literal interpretation. (Of course the aspectual classes may, as we saw earlier, be the same, purely by coincidence.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> This is true of 'Fred sawed logs' , which describes an activity on both the literal and the idiomatic interpretation.) null We have also suggested that, if we take the process 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 difference 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 aspectual composition, they will describe eventualities 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 necessary 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 future work. Such work will need to involve the detailed investigation of a wide range of idioms and the exact process of their aspectual composition.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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