Phrasal Templates

Mark Liberman has been discussing phrasal templates without content words over at Language Log. Ray Jackendoff discusses this subject is at some length in Foundations of Language, and he includes an even more extreme example.

In the section on these kinds of phrases (pp. 172-177), which he calls "constructional idioms", he mentions several. One is V one's N off/out, as in sing your heart out. Jackendoff says that the noun and preposition are fixed, with the two possibilities being heart out and head off, but I can think of at least one more: talk my ear off, which is on the borderline between his clearly idiomatic examples and an example with a literal reading like chewed his leg off.

Next, Jackendoff mentions V one's way PP, as in drank his way across the country, and notes how it can be used with verbs that don't ordinarily take way as a direct object, and that it only works with verbs with no other arguments (i.e. drank beer his way across the country doesn't work).

Next up is V-ing the N away, as in twisting the night away. Jackendoff points out that this idiom, too, can be used even when the noun is not ordinarily an acceptable object for the verb—noting that you cannot * twist the night.

Finally, he gets to the extreme example I mentioned. On page 175, he writes:

At this point we have seen nearly every possible combination of specified constituents and free variables in structure. One might wonder whether there is also a situation in which the structure is composed entirely of free variables. This appears to be an appropriate solution for the well-known resultative construction, illustrated in (24).

(24) Wilma watered the tulips flat.
          Clyde cooked the pot black.
          Drive your engine clean. [ad for gasoline]

The verb water has a semantic argument expressed as a direct object: the thing on which water is sprinkled. But the further result, the tulips acquiring some property (besides becoming wet), is not part of the verb's ordinary meaning. And although one can cook food and drive a car, one cannot * cook a pot or * drive a car engine: these verbs do not license sematic arguments of these types. Thus something special is happening in both syntax and semantics when these verbs are followed by a direct object plus a predicate adjective.

Up to this point in the book, Jackendoff has been proposing that items in the lexicon have phonological, syntactic, and semantic information, and that idioms are simply entries in the lexicon that have particularly complicated syntax and semantics. Based on the resultative construction, he suggests that there can be "defective" entries in the lexicon that have syntax and semantics, but no phonology; and if there can be a "defective" entry that lacks one of the three, why not a "doubly defective" entry that lacks both phonology and semantics? He proposes that such lexical items do exist: we call them phrase structure rules.

Foundations of Language is full of good stuff—I always enjoy it when somebody who has been immersed in a complex subject for a long time attempts to writes up the current thinking on How It All Hangs Together.

[Now playing: "Frou-frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires" by The Cocteau Twins]