Words: Syntactic structures and pragmatic meanings

Words in their place. Festchrift for JL Mackenzie, …, 2004

Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, 2019

We present a syntactic account of the derivation of two types of attributive nominal compounds in Spanish, Russian and Greek. These include right-headed "root" compounds, which exhibit more "word"-like properties and single stress domains, and left-headed "semi-phrasal" compounds with more phrasal properties and independent stress domains for the two compound members. We propose that both compound structures are formed on a small clause predicate phrase, with their different properties derived from the merger of the predicate member of the small clause as a root or as a larger nominal unit with additional functional projections. The proposed structures provide an explanation of observed lexical integrity effects, as well as specific predictions of patterns of compound formation crosslinguistically. 1. Introduction. A hotly debated issue is to what extent morphological principles are independent from the syntactic ones. There is no agreement on how and why differences between "words," "phrases," and other units proposed to exist in-between these two categories arise. Syntactic approaches to word-formation such as Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993, Marantz 1997 and related work), antisymmetry (Kayne 1994, Koopman and Szabolcsi 2000) and more recently nanosyntax (Starke 2009) derive morphosyntactic properties of different units from the derivational path of their formation. For instance, Marantz (2001) proposes a difference between units created via combinations of functional heads with roots vs. those created at higher levels. In this work, we show additional evidence for this distinction from compound structure. This evidence comes from two distinct types of attributive compounds in Spanish, Russian, and Greek that show several common asymmetries. We will predict these asymmetries in a syntactic analysis in which a distinction is made between compounds that involve merging of roots vs. those that involve merging of larger structures. We adopt a modified Distributed Morphology/antisymmetric framework and propose that the specific compounds discussed in this paper are relative clauses with an internal small clause structure realized as a Relator Phrase (DenDikken 2006). The semantic and formal head of a compound is the subject of the small clause, and the predicate member can merge either as a root or a larger structure (e.g., nP, numP). These two types of options create two types of compounds with distinct properties summarized in Section 2. Thus, compound-distinctive properties, as well as their differences from full syntactic phrases are derived from basic assumptions about syntactic structure and operations which have been developed to account for "purely" syntactic phenomena (phrasal movement, predicate inversion, licensing, quantization, and so on). We also discuss how this account predicts the existence of lexical integrity effects which are usually taken to support a distinction between words and phrases. On our account existence of such effects is

Studies in Language, 2005

2020

This paper is concerned with the compositionality of deverbal compounds such as<br> <em>budget assessment</em> in English. We present an interdisciplinary study on how the<br> morphosyntactic properties of the deverbal noun head (e.g., <em>assessment</em>) can pre-<br> dict the interpretation of the compound, as mediated by the syntactic-semantic<br> relationship between the non-head (e.g., <em>budget</em>) and the head. We start with Grim-<br> shaw's (1990) observation that deverbal nouns are ambiguous between composi-<br> tionally interpreted argument structure nominals, which inherit verbal structure<br> and realize arguments (e.g., <em>the assessment of the budget by the government</em>), and<br> more lexicalized result nominals, which preserve no verbal properties or arguments<br> (e.g., <em>The assessment is on the table</em>.). Our hypothesis is that deverbal ...

Language Sciences, 2017

A new perspective on how to account for the syntactic category of synthetic compounds.Synthetic compounds do not have to be endocentric; they may be exocentric.The syntactic category of Akan compounds is a holistic constructional property.The tonal melody of Akan compounds may reflect their degree of semantic transparency.The noun constituent of an exocentric synthetic compound may be object or subject.A synthetic compound is regarded as an endocentric construction in which a deverbal nominal head inherits the internal argument of the underlying verb. The Akan noun-verb nominal compound is analysed as a synthetic noun-noun compound with a deverbal right-hand constituent. This is based on a pattern of downstep observed on the first syllable of the second constituent, triggered by a putative floating low tone of a deleted nominal(izing) prefix. This approach, which makes the compound endocentric, is needed to account for the nominal syntactic category of the compound, given that the left-hand nominal constituent is not the head. In this paper, we discuss and reject this endocentric analysis, showing that the argument for the nominal status of the right-hand constituent based on tonal melody alone is weak because some constructs which meet the structural requirement fail to exhibit the specified tonal melody. We argue, however, that we can maintain the synthetic compound analysis without committing to defend the view that the right-hand constituent is nominalized. This is the exocentric synthetic compound view. We present a constructionist account in which the syntactic category is a holistic constructional property of the compound, which is inherited from a meta-schema for Akan compounding. We also present a preliminary constructionist account of the tonal melody of the compound.

Lingua, 2014

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

Roots and Affixes is an investigation into the primitives of syntax. It focuses on the lexical projection and the categorial head. Accordingly, it consists of two parts. The first part argues that the features of lexical vocabulary items (such as light and kiss) are not an active part ...

We present an interdisciplinary study on the interaction between the interpretation of noun-noun deverbal compounds (DCs; e.g., task assignment) and the morphosyntactic properties of their deverbal heads in English. Underlying hypotheses from theoretical linguistics are tested with tools and resources from computational linguistics. We start with Grimshaw’s (1990) insight that deverbal nouns are ambiguous between argument-supporting nominal (ASN) readings, which inherit verbal arguments (e.g., the assignment of the tasks), and the less verbal and more lexicalized Result Nominal and Simple Event readings (e.g., a two-page assignment). Following Grimshaw, our hypothesis is that the former will realize object arguments in DCs, while the latter will receive a wider range of interpretations like root compounds headed by non-derived nouns (e.g., chocolate box). Evidence from a large corpus assisted by machine learning techniques confirms this hypothesis, by showing that, besides other features, the realization of internal arguments by deverbal heads outside compounds (i.e., the most distinctive ASN-property in Grimshaw 1990) is a good predictor for an object interpretation of non-heads in DCs.