My primary research interest in linguistics is in providing an account of the subtly productive processes underlying the novel generation of structures that are typically seen as wholly (or at least mostly) idiosyncratic: idiomatic multi-word expressions.

Particularly, I want to provide a principled analysis for why creative idiom extension can occur at all. An example of idiom extension is: “if this cat gets let out of the bag, a lot of people are going to get scratched” (example due to Egan 2008).

If cat really means SECRET in the canonical let-out-of-the-bag idiom, then what is it that allows scratch to suddenly mean generalized HARM or MISFORTUNE in this example, even though this is never canonically admissible?

My tentative proposal, inspired by a frame semantic view of encyclopedic linguistic conceptual organization, is that idiomatic cat simultaneously evokes a CAT frame and a SECRET frame (correspondingly, all non-nonce idiom words are predicted to evoke their literal and idiomatic frames). World knowledge confers upon us the knowledge that cats can cause harm and that secrets can cause harm. Therefore, English speakers are readily equipped to dynamically assign a mapping between the prototypical cause of harm in the CAT frame (the scratch) and the prototypical cause of harm in the SECRET frame (the revealing of the secret).

I’m also interested in how spatial metaphors are exploited in English idiomatic constructions; specifically, I believe there is a class of English transitive VP idioms where the verbal element is more semantically transparent (i.e. has a tighter connection to its prototypical literal meaning) than the NP, which I propose is often due to the verb’s exploiting of some sort of spatial metaphor, which in turn allows it to generalize and retain its ‘idiomatic’ meaning outside of the canonical idiom. Take rock the boat, bury the hatchet, and face the music. Now, consider these near-paraphrases: rock the foundations, rock the system, bury our rivalry, bury our differences, face the reality, face the facts. The reverse is not possible; that is, we can’t readily derive paraphrases by replacing the verb with a non-idiomatic synonym as in contend with the music, disregard the hatchet, disrupt the boat, etc.