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Words: Syntactic structures and pragmatic meanings

Profile image of Robyn CarstonRobyn Carston

2022, Synthese

https://doi.org/10.1007/S11229-022-03861-1
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Abstract

don't look at compounds in this paper, a complex topic with a large literature. The meaning of compounds is virtually never semantically compositional, requiring pragmatics, at a minimum, to determine the relevant relation between their component parts (see Bezuidenhout 2019). 3 There are two kinds of functors, a point which will be of interest in Sect. 3 on delimiting the domain of non-compositional content: (i) categorizers (nominal, verbal, adjectival) which may be phonologically realized by various affixes, including '-tion', '-ize', '-al', and (ii) functional items that project further levels of structure like the determiners (e.g. 'the') and number (e.g. plural) for nominal structures; or tense (e.g. past) and aspect (e.g. the perfective/imperfective contrast, as in 'has eaten the apple' vs. 'was eating the apple') for verbal structures. (2017) for a clear account of developments within the lexicalist approach and of the issues that led to a radical redrawing of the lexicon/syntax boundary on constructivist and other root-based accounts.

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