6.8 The status of inheritance hierarchies
We are now in a position to return to two questions concerning idioms: How does the grammar/lexicon capture the
redundancy of idioms? And how do phrase structure rules place pressure on idioms to be regular?
Return toour exampletake to task, repeatedas (34). Itshares mostofitsparts withoneor anotherofthelexical entries
in (35).
The only part of the idio mthat isnotredundant with some other lexical item is the connection to the idiomatic
semanticsCRITICIZE. In fact, the redundancy goes deeper than sharing phonological and syntactic form: the idiom's
past tense istook to taskrather thantaked to task. This shows that in an important sense theidiom is borrowingnotjust
the phonological formtake, but theword take.
A parallelproble marises withirregular verbs, but in mirror i mage. Take evena co mpletely suppletivepair likego–went.
Despiteits novelphonology, we know thatwentborrows its syntax–semantics connection from theverbgoand doesn't
just repeat similar semantic material, because every idiomatic use ofgo(go berserk, go well with NP(‘suit NP’), etc.) still
has the past tensewent. And we know thatwentborrows fro mthe syntactic past tense as well—not the semantic
past—because theuse ofsyntacticpasttensefor conditional(If I went berserk, what would you do?)stillyieldswent, notgoed.