A GENERAL THEORY OF WORD STRUCTURE

Within the context of generative grammar, a variety of approaches to morphology have been pursued. In the first work on the topic, Lees proposed that complex words – compound words as well as those involving derivational or inflectional affixation – be derived through the operation of syntactic transformations from deep structures including only noncomplex words. Chomsky (1970) presented important arguments against this approach to derivational morphology, concluding that derivationally complex words must be present in deep structure. The same sorts of arguments lead one to conclude that compounds are present in deep structure (cf. Allen (1978)). In this monograph, as in other generative works on morphology, the conclusion that words with derivational morphology and compound words are not formed by syntactic transformation is taken as a point of departure. Along with this view, I adopt the somewhat less universally held assumption that inflectional affixation is not accomplished by syntactic transformation, but that, with derivational affixation and compounding, it instead forms part of a morphological component of grammar.

My purpose is to examine what I will call the syntax of words, by which I mean the structure of words and the system of rules for generating that structure. While much has been said in the recent linguistic tradition about the syntactic structures of which words form the basic units, considerably less attention has been paid to the structure of the words themselves. Perhaps this has come about because word structure seemed perfectly obvious, apparently a mere extension of syntactic structure. This is the view of word structure implicit in Chomsky and Halle (1968; hereafter SPE), for example, and one that is adopted in most subsequent works. However, it is an error to view word structure as merely the “lower” portion of a syntactic representation that is entirely homogeneous in character. It can be argued that, aside from the category Word itself, the categories involved in word structure are distinct from those of syntactic structure and, moreover, that the two types of structure combine these categories in significantly different ways. It in fact seems possible to construe word structure as an autonomous system. In my view, the category Word lies at the interface in syntactic representation of two varieties of structure, which must be defined by two discrete sets of principles in the grammar. Yet I will argue that word structure has the same general formal properties as syntactic structure and, moreover, that it is generated by the same sort of rule system. <…>

A context-free rewriting system by itself is capable of generating all| of the words of a language, but only at a certain cost. Members of a certain class of morphemes, the affixes, display idiosyncratic distributional properties. The suffix -ity, for example, attaches only to an adjective and with it forms a noun: obesity = N[A[obese]A -ity]N. The suffix -ify, on the other hand, always constitutes a verb along with a sister adjective or noun: codify = V[N[code]N -ify]V, purify = V[A[pure]A -ify]V. The most obvious way of capturing these distributional peculiarities within a context-free rewriting system is to introduce each affix directly by a rule specific to it, as in (1.1), which means, in effect, positing a separate rule for every affix of the language:

(1.1) N ® A ity

V ® N ify

V ® A ify

(Such a rule system would also involve rules rewriting the preterminal categories N, A, V with elements of the terminal vocabulary; e.g., N ® code, object, boy, etc., A ® pure, nice, etc.) This treatment of affixes is inadequate because it fails to assign affixes a categorial status and to capture generalizations about possible word structures in a direct way. <…>

To keep the focus on the issues which I consider to be central here – the issues of the nature of word structure and the rule system for generating it – I will assume, along with the various other generative theories of morphology, that the rules of word structure form part of what one may call the lexical component or simply the lexicon (understood in a broad sense). As it is viewed here and in most earlier theories, the lexical component contains a variety of subcomponents. First, it contains a list of freely occurring lexical items (which I will assume to be words, in English). We may call this the dictionary (or lexicon, in the restricted sense). Second, it contains a list of the bound morphemes of the language. This, together with the dictionary proper, I will call the extended dictionary. Third, the lexical component includes the set of rules characterizing the possible morphological structures of a language, the word structure rules of the present theory. The word structure rules, along with the structures they define, are the central concern of this monograph. Together with the extended dictionary, they form the core of the word structure component of the lexicon or, shall we say, the morphological base. <…>

One characteristic that distinguishes morphology from syntax, to be sure, is the fact that many of the entities defined as well formed by the rules of morphology are fixed expressions. Most words we speak and understand we have heard before, while sentences are for the most part novel to us. More precisely, what distinguishes words from sentences is that most words are in the dictionary.

There are a number of reasons for saying that the list of items called the dictionary forms part of the speaker’s knowledge (or grammar) of a language. First, speakers have intuitions about what is or is not an actual word of the language (as well as intuitions about what constitutes a possible word of the language). Second, and more important, the individual characteristics of words are not always predictable. The meaning of a simple word is totally unpredictable, and even in the case of complex words the meaning often cannot he predicted on the basis of its component parts. The conclusion is that a word and its (idiosyncratic) meaning must be paired in a list; that list is the dictionary. Phrases whose meaning is not compositional – that is, those phrases that are usually called idioms – will also have to be listed in the lexicon.

Consider now the fact that the multimorphemic words of this list must be said to have an internal structure. Speakers have intuitions about the structure of existing words of their language. These intuitions are presumably based on their knowledge of the word structure rules of the language, and indeed it seems that in general the existing lexical items of a language (more exactly, the words of the lexicon) have structures generable by the morphological component of the language. But the word structure rules cannot be viewed as generating these words anew each time they are used, for this contradicts the notion that they are listed; no distinction would then be drawn between existing and possible (or newly generated) words, and no means would be available for representing their idiosyncratic, noncompositional features. In the case of existing lexical items, then, it would seem appropriate to view the word structure rules as redundancy rules or well-formedness conditions on lexical items. More generally, it seems possible to impose the following condition:

For every word of the language, there must exist a derivation via the word structure rules of the language.

This condition allows us to treat existing words and possible words in uniform fashion. If a word (existing or possible) is to be well formed, its structure must be among those generable by the word structure rules of the language.

COMPOUNDING

Compounds in English are a type of word structure made up of two constituents, each belonging to one of the categories Noun, Adjective, Verb, or Preposition. The compound itself may belong to the category Noun, Verb, or Adjective. My purpose here is not to provide a thoroughgoing description of compounding in English (which the reader can find in Marchand (1969), Adams (1973), and Jespersen (1954)). Rather, I will focus on what I consider to be the essential features of English compounds and their relevance to the theory of word structure outlined previously. <…>

The vast majority of English compound types are headed – specifically, right-headed – and the heads of these compounds display the syntactic and semantic characteristics that are expected of heads. There are some compound types which are clearly not headed. <…>

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 815