July 16th Forum Lecture: Slouching toward Idiomaticity: Fillmore’s Rough Idea

Presenters: Laura Michaelis

In their 1988 magnum opus—known as the “let alone paper”—Fillmore and collaborators offer a pithy yet puzzling definition of idiom: “an idiomatic expression or construction is something a language user could fail to know while knowing everything else in the language” (p. 504). What, if any, is the difference between an idiomatic expression and a construction? The central insight of Let Alone is that language presents a continuum of idiomaticity, and that a construction grammar must capture expressions across this gradient—from frozen phrases to fully productive rules (Fillmore et al. 1988; Goldberg 1995, 2006; Wulff 2010; Culicover & Jackendoff 2005; Croft 2001; Hilpert 2014; Kay & Michaelis 2012). But is in the know—at one end—the same kind of grammatical object as the Head-Complement rule at the other?

Fillmore et al. (1988) list four conditions under which an expression can qualify as a construction: (1) it dependencies are not be limited to a mother and daughters, but span wider portions of the syntactic tree; (2) it specifies syntactic, lexical, semantic, and pragmatic information simultaneously; (3) it is a word or lexeme “mentionable in syntactic constructions”; and (4) it is idiomatic by virtue of conveying meaning “distinct from what might be calculated from the associated semantics of the set of smaller constructions that could be used to build the same morphosyntactic object” (p. 501). (Fillmore et al. 1988: 501). All such expressions constitute “conventional pairings between contexts and particular expressions by which conventionalized meanings get conveyed in those contexts” (Fillmore 1979: 72).

Let Alone and other works (e.g., Fillmore & Kay 1995, Kay & Fillmore 1999, Fillmore 1979, 1985, 2012, 2013) encouraged us to look at complex expressions through the lens of idiomaticity—to see words as constructions (both constellations of syntactic, phonological and pragmatic properties) and constructions as words (constructions license phrasal signs that mean what they mean in a word-like way). But these analogies obscured some fundamental differences: (a) many (if not most) idiomatic expressions are like sing a different tune, in having syntactically manipulable subparts (as in, e.g., Now a different tune is being sung), and are thus not realistically treated as ‘words with spaces’ (Kay et al. 2025); and (b) it strains credulity to assert that single signs (words and lexemes) are the same thing as combinations of signs (phrases). How can we strike a balance between ‘meaning by convention’ and ‘meaning by composition’ when we are analyzing complex expressions with idiomatic properties?

In this talk, I will address this question by outlining a lexicalist implementation of the idiomaticity continuum, based on Sign-Based Construction Grammar (Boas et al. 2012, Sag 2012, Fillmore 2012, 2013, Michaelis 2012). SBCG represents this range of complex expressions in a uniform way: whether phrasal or lexical, all are modeled as sign types that specify phonological and morphological structure, meaning, use conditions and relevant syntactic information (including syntactic category and combinatoric potential). Constructional meanings are the meanings to be discovered at every point along the idiomaticity continuum.

References

Croft, William. (2001). Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Culicover, Peter W. and Ray S. Jackendoff. (2005). Simpler Syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fillmore, Charles J. (1979). Innocence: A Second Idealization for Linguistics. In Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (pp. 63-76).

Fillmore, Charles J. (1985). Syntactic intrusions and the Notion of Grammatical Construction. In Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (pp. 73-86).

Fillmore, Charles J. (2013). Berkeley Construction Grammar. In T. Hoffman and Graeme Trousdale (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar. Oxford University Press. (pp. 111–132). 

Fillmore, Charles J., Paul Kay and Mary Catherine O’Connor. (1988). Regularity and Idiomaticity in Grammatical Constructions: The Case of let alone. Language 64: 501-538.

Fillmore, Charles J., Lee-Goldman, R., & Rhodes, R. (2012). The Framenet Constructicon. In H. Boas and I. Sag. (eds.), Sign-Based Construction Grammar (pp. 309–372). CSLI.

Goldberg, Adele. (1995). Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goldberg, Adele. (2006). Constructions at Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hilpert, Martin. (2014). Construction Grammar and its Application to English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Kay, Paul and Laura A. Michaelis. (2012). Constructional Meaning and Compositionality. In C. Maienborn, K. von Heusinger and P. Portner, (eds.), Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning. Vol. 3. Berlin: de Gruyter. 2271-2296.

Kay, Paul, Laura A. Michaelis, Ivan A. Sag and Dan Flickinger. (2025). A Lexical Theory of Phrasal Idioms. Idiomatic Expressions and Grammatical Constructions. Stanford: CSLI Publications.

Michaelis, Laura A. (2015). Sign-Based Construction Grammar. In B. Heine and H. Narrog, (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 155-176.

Sag, Ivan A. (2012). Sign-Based Construction Grammar: An Informal Synopsis. In H. Boas and I.A. Sag, (eds.), Sign-Based Construction Grammar. Stanford: CSLI Publications. 69-202.

Sag, Ivan. A., Hans C. Boas and Paul Kay. (2012). Introducing Sign-Based Construction Grammar. In H. Boas and I.A. Sag, (eds.), Sign-Based Construction Grammar. Stanford: CSLI Publications. 1-28.

Presenters

Laura Michaelis

University of Colorado Boulder

Laura A. Michaelis is Professor and Chair of Linguistics at the University of Colorado Boulder, and a Faculty Fellow in the Institute of Cognitive Science. She received her PhD in Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley under the direction of Charles J. Fillmore. She is a cognitive-functional syntactician and semanticist specializing in the tense-aspect interface, corpus syntax, syntactic innovation, lexical semantics, and the discourse-syntax interface. She is one of the developers of Sign-based Construction Grammar, a syntactic theory that represents the grammar of a language as a structured inventory of patterns ranging from the highly schematic to the very specific. With Jongbok Kim, she co-authored a 2020 textbook on Construction Grammar, Syntactic Constructions of English (CUP). She is one of the founding editors of the CUP interdisciplinary journal Language and Cognition, also published by CUP. Her work has appeared in the journals Language, Studies in Language, Journal of Linguistics, Linguistics & Philosophy, Journal of Semantics, Cognition and Cognitive Linguistics. She is a 2022 Fellow of the LSA, a 2022 recipient of the Boulder Faculty Assembly's Excellence in Research award and a 2022 recipient of the CU Boulder Graduate School's Outstanding Faculty Mentor award. In current work, she is examining syntactic aspects of climate change discourse.