On Compounding in English and Spanish

2017

This collection of papers on phrasal compounds is part of a bigger project whose<br> aims are twofold: First, it seeks to broaden the typological perspective by pro-<br> viding data for as many different languages as possible to gain a better under-<br> standing of the phenomenon itself. Second, based on these data, which clearly<br> show interaction between syntax and morphology, it aims to discuss theoretical<br> models which deal with this kind of interaction in different ways. For example,<br> models like Generative Grammar assume components of grammar and a clear-<br> cut distinction between the lexicon (often including morphology) and grammar<br> which mostly stands for the computational system (syntax). Other models, like<br> construction grammar do not assume such components and are rather based on<br> a lexicon including constructs. A comparison of these models makes it then pos-<br> sible to assess their exp...

Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, 2002

Bibliography I more generally, the concept "grammatical." Notice that in order to set the aims of grammar significantly it is sufficient to assume q partial knowledge of sentences and non-sentences. That is. we may assume for this discussion that certain sequences of phonemes are definitely sentences, and that certain &her sequences are definitely non-sentences. In many intermediate c --ecide, when JJie . . grammar is set up in the simplest wav -< the h r sentences and excludes the clear non-sentences. This is a familiar feature of exp1ication.l A certain number of clear cases, then, will provide us with a criterion of adeauacv for any particular grammar. For a single Ian? taken in isolation, this ~rovides only a weak test of adequacy, since many different gampars may hknane the clear cases .vro~erly. This can be generalized to a very strong condition, however, if we insist that the clear cases be handled properly for each language by grammars all of which are constructed by the hat is. each grammar is related to the corpus of sentences in the language it describes in a way fixed in advance for all grammars by a given linguistic 'theory. We then have' a very strong test of adequacy for a 1ingui.stic theory that attempts to give a general explanation for the notion "grammatical sentence" in terms of "observed sentence," and for the set of grammars constructed in ' accordance with such a theory. It is furthermore a reasonable requirement', since weare interested not only in particular languages, .. but also in the general nature of Language. There is a great deal more that can be said about this crucial topic, but this would take us too far afield. Cf. 5 6. On what basis do we actually go about separating grammatical sequences from ungrammatical sequences? I shall not attempt to Cf.,; for example, N. Goodman, The structure of appearance (Cambridge, 1951), pp: 5-6. ~o t i & that to meet the aims of grammar, given a linguistic theory,, it is sufficient to have a partial knowledge of the sentences (i.e., a corpus) of the language, since a linguistic theory will state the relation between the set of observed sentences and the set of grammatical sentences; i-e., it will define "grammatical sentence" in terms of "observed sentence," certain properties of the observed sentences, and certain properties of.grammars. . Quine's formulation, a linguistic theory will give a general .explanation for what 'could' be in language on the basis of "what is plus simplicity of the laws whereby we describe and extrapolate -what is". (W. V. Quine, From a logicalpoint of view [Cambridge, 19531,~. 54). Cf. $ 6.1. ' ' * See my "Semantic considerations in grammar," Monograph no. 8, pp. 141-53 (1955), for a more detailed investigation of (117;). a Note that we cannot argue that "bank" in "the river bank" and "bank" in "the savings bank" are two occurrences of the same word, since this is precisely the'question under investigation. To say that two utterance tokens are occurrences of the same word is to say that they are not phonemically distinct, and presumably this is what thesynonymity criterion (1 17i) is supposed to determine for us.

Synthese, 2022

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.

The Structure of Cp and IP: The Cartography of …, 2004

Introduction Syntactic structures are complex objects, whose subtle properties have been highlighted and elucidated by half a century of formal syntactic studies, building on a much older tradition. Structures are interesting objects of their own, both in their internal constitution and in their interactions with various grammatical principles and processes. The cartography of syntactic structures is the line of research which addresses this topic: it is the attempt to draw maps as precise and detailed as possible of syntactic configurations. Broadly construed in this way, cartography is not an approach or a hypothesis: it is a research topic asking the question: what are the right structural maps for natural language syntax? Answers may differ, and very different maps may be, and have been, proposed, but the question as such inevitably arises as a legitimate and central question for syntactic theory. If it is a virtual truism that cartography can be construed as a topic and not as a framework, it is also the case that cartographic studies have often adopted certain methodological and heuristic guidelines, and also certain substantive hypotheses on the nature of syntactic structures, which form a coherent body of assumptions and a rather well-defined research direction; we will try to illustrate some ideas and results of this direction in the present chapter. If structures have, in a sense, always been central in generative grammar, the idea of focusing on structural maps arose around the early nineties, following a track parallel to and interacting with the Minimalist Program. Perhaps the main triggering factor was the explosion of functional heads identified and implied in syntactic analyses in the first ten years of the Principles and Parameters framework. One critical step was the full-fledged extension of X-bar theory to the functional elements of the clause (Chomsky 1986) as a CP-IP-VP structure; and the observation that other configurations, e.g. nominal expressions, were amenable to a hierarchical structure with a lexical projection embedded within a functional structure (such as Abney's DP hypothesis, Abney 1987). These advances provided a natural format for the study of the structure of phrases and clauses as hierarchical sequences of the same building block, the fundamental X-bar schema (or, later, elementary applications of Merge); the lowest occurrence of the building block typically is the projection of a lexical category, e.g. a noun or a verb, and this element is typically completed by a series of

The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Interfaces, 2007

According to the traditional view, the relation between morphology and syntax is the following: while morphology builds up word forms-typically by combining roots with other roots and with affixes, but also by applying other operations to them, syntax takes fully inflected words as input and combines them into phrases and sentences. The division of labour between morphology and syntax is thus perfect: morphology only operates below the word level whereas syntax only operates above the word level.

Lingua, 2010

In this paper, I explore the issue of the division of labor between syntax and morphology within the context of the lexicalist vs. nonlexicalist debate on the basis of case studies of phrasal compounds in English and ber-constructions in Indonesian. I first show what challenges these phenomena raise for various existing versions of the lexicalist theory to have a clear grasp of what aspect(s) of the theory must be dropped or improved upon. I then propose (non-lexicalist) alternative accounts of the two phenomena. I show that phrasal compounds can be explained on a par with regular compounding of two simplex roots as a natural consequence of the Multiple Spell-Out model of the Minimalist Program. I provide evidence that ber-constructions in Indonesian are derived via head movement, rejecting potential alternative lexicalist accounts in terms of lexical compounding. I also briefly discuss several architectural design specifications that any model of the morphology-syntax interface must meet. I conclude that the firewall theory of the interface, which determines the degree of the interpenetration between syntax and morphology on a language-particular basis, not only meets these specifications, but also serves as an explanatory model within which the syntax-morphology interaction can be productively pursued. Crown

Linguistics and Philosophy, 1983

Lingua, 2014

Argument structure in morphology and syntax: An introduction 1. Where do arguments come from?