The Division of Labor between Syntactic Argument Structures and Roots in the Aspectual Composition of Idiomatic Expressions

Harley (2005) argued that aspectual composition is structurally determined by the syntax of argument structure but can also be idiosyncratically constrained by the nature of roots. In this paper, I apply her bipartite proposal of aspectual composition to the analysis of idiomatic expressions. In particular, I show that the well-known distinction between “structural arguments” vs. “root participants” (Rappaport Hovav & Levin 1998), which is argued to be better formulated in purely formal/syntactic terms, is relevant to determine the aspectual composition of idioms: those structural arguments that occupy a sister-to-v position behave differently from root participants, which do not appear in a sister-to-v position.