Let's paint the town red for a few hours

Abstract

It has recently been claimed that aspect 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 exceptions. We present examples of idiomatic expressions where aspect is not derived compositionally - or at least, not in McGinnis's sense. Many (but not all) of these exceptions fall into a class described by Jackendoff (1997a) as 'fake object resultatives'. We draw some tentative conclusions about the nature and classification of those idioms which show apparent non-compositionality of aspect. Furthermore, we suggest that such idioms might be regarded as aspectually compositional, if aspectual composition is taken to include as part of its input Krifka's (1992) 'thematic relations'.