Twistin' the night away

The 'time'-away construction, exemplified by We slept the whole afternoon away, proves to have a complex set of syntactic and semantic properties. In particular, the NP the whole afternoon behaves syntactically like a direct object, even though it is clearly not licensed by the verb sleep. This construction is shown to be distinct from two others that it superficially resembles, the resultative and the way-construction. It is also compared with a number of other semi-idiomatic VP constructions. Two approaches for licensing the NP object are compared: a lexical rule approach, in which sleep away is treated as a complex verb that licenses the object, and a constructional approach, in which V NP away is listed as a meaning-bearing construction that licenses both the verb and the object.