The Routledge Handbook of Syntax by Carnie Andrew; Siddiqi Dan; Sato Yosuke

Author:Carnie, Andrew; Siddiqi, Dan; Sato, Yosuke
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1682976
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

3

Weak lexicalism: inflection versus derivation

There is a series of well-known connections between syntax and the three types of inflectional morphology: case, agreement, and verbal inflection (tense, aspect, mood, etc.). Verbal inflection is a direct expression of formal features that are considered by most syntacticians to be syntactic features. Case (head-marking) and agreement (dependent-marking) are two sides of the same coin: they express grammatical relations morphologically,3 a function that is clearly, and indeed only, syntactic in nature. Dating back at least to Sapir (1921) is the typological generalization that languages have a choice in expressing grammatical relations: use syntax or use morphology. Since this choice seems to be scalar rather than categorical, this typological pattern is normally presented as a continuum called the Index of Synthesis (Comrie 1981). At one end of this scale are isolating languages (e.g., English, Mandarin) which use word order to encode grammatical function. At the other end are synthetic languages (e.g., Latin, Navajo) which use affixation for the same job (see also Greenberg 1959; 1963). Furthermore, the inflectional meanings/features expressed by affixation or word order are also often expressed with syntactic elements as well. For example, in English, the only productive case marking is genitive, which is expressed by a determiner clitic (’s) when the genitive argument is left of the head noun and by a case particle (of ) when the argument is to the right. Also, what is often marked by oblique cases (such as instrumental) in some languages is marked with prepositions in others. Perhaps most convincing, some languages express verbal inflection primarily with auxiliary verbs while other languages express it primarily with affixes. In fact, it is not uncommon for languages to use the combination of affixation and an auxiliary to express a singular inflectional meaning (perfect aspect in English and Latin, for example).

These connections strongly suggest that inflectional morphology is a function of the syntactic component of the grammar. Assuming that the arguments beginning with Chomsky (1970) that exclude derivational morphology from the syntax are compelling, it is logical then to adopt a Weak Lexicalist perspective. It seems odd, then, that this position is overwhelmingly held by syntacticians and only very infrequently by morphologists. This is because this position assumes an easily categorizable dichotomy between derivational and inflectional morphology, an assumption which may not be tenable.

Pre-theoretically, the traditional conceptual definition of derivational morphology is that it derives a new word (i.e., a new lexical entry) from an extant one. Inflectional morphology, on the other hand, changes the form of a word to express morphosyntactic features. In practice, a strict dichotomy is difficult to defend. It has been long acknowledged within the morphological literature that there is no agreed upon definitional distinction that captures the intuition that they are distinct (see Matthews 1972). For example, one of the traditional distinctive features of derivation, perhaps the most important, is that forms created through derivational processes are susceptible to lexicalization (cf. cat > catty). However, the majority of derived forms do not have idiosyncratic form or meaning and are completely compositionally transparent (rethink, unequip).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.