The syntactic literature on idioms contains some proposals that are surprising from a compositional perspective. For example, there are proposals that, in the case of verb-object idioms, the verb combines directly with the noun inside its DP complement, and the determiner is introduced higher up in the syntactic structure, or is late-adjoined. This seems to violate compositionality insofar as it is generally assumed that the semantic role of the determiner is to convert a noun to the appropriate semantic type to serve as the argument to the function denoted by the verb. In this paper, we establish a connection between this line of analysis and lines of work in semantics that have developed outside of the domain of idioms, particularly work on incorporation and work that combines formal and distributional semantic modelling. This semantic work separates the composition of descriptive content from that of discourse referent introducing material; our proposal shows that this separation offers a particularly promising way to handle the compositional difficulties posed by idioms, including certain patterns of variation in intervening determiners and modifiers.

The aims of the paper are twofold. First, it provides a systematic qualitative corpus study into differences between Russian and Czech in the use of aspect in chains of single, episodic events, as well as in habitual contexts, which takes into account the role of verb class, aspectual affixes, discourse relations, and other factors contributing to the overall aspectual interpretation in a given sentence. The findings suggest that while Russian makes narrative progression and habituality visible already on the verb forms, by employing exclusively perfective and imperfective verb forms, respectively, Czech relies more heavily on the context itself and uses (im)perfective verb forms mostly to signal duration vs. change of state. The second part of the paper addresses differences in aspect use between the two languages in so-called general-factual contexts (presuppositional and existential). Against the background of the empirical findings of the corpus study, I argue against the received view that Czech makes use of imperfective verb forms to mark existential readings. The presuppositional reading of imperfective forms, which I assume to be related to the process/durative reading of imperfectives, is argued to exist in both languages.

This paper serves as an introduction to a special collection on the form, use and meaning of past passive participles used in perfect and passive constructions. We discuss various issues which later become prominent in the papers of the volume, which include morphology and participle formation, the use of past passive participles in perfect forms, as well as in verbal and adjectival passives, and the interpretation of such participles. Given that participles in general are characterised as a mixed category with verbal and adjectival properties, we devote some time to address the source of the verbal and adjectival characteristics as well as the source of stativity and eventivity in the interpretation of past passive participles.

Passivization played a central role in shaping both linguistic theory and psycholinguistic approaches to sentence processing, language acquisition and impairment. We present the results of two experiments that simultaneously test online processing (self-paced reading) and offline comprehension (through comprehension questions) of passives in German while also manipulating the event structure of the predicates used. In contrast to English, German passives are unambiguously verbal, allowing for the study of passivization independent of a confound in the degree of interpretive ambiguity (verbal/adjectival). In English, this ambiguity interacts with event structure, with passives of stative predicates naturally receiving an adjectival interpretation. In a recent study, Paolazzi et al. (2015, 2016) showed that in contrast to the mainstream theoretical perspective, passive sentences are not inherently harder to process than actives. Complexity of passivization in English is tied to the aspectual class of the verbal predicate passivized: with eventive predicates, passives are read faster (as hinted at in previous literature) and generate no comprehension difficulties (in contrast to previous findings with mixed predicates). Complexity effects with passivization, in turn, are only found with stative predicates. The asymmetry is claimed to stem from the temporary adjectival/verbal ambiguity of stative passives in English. We predict that the observed difficulty with English stative passives disappears in German, given that in this language the passive construction under investigation is unambiguously verbal. The results support this prediction: both offline and online there was no difficulty with passivization, under either eventive or stative predicates. In fact, passives and their rich morphology eased parsing across both types of predicates.