Sergio Scalise

The Lexical Integrity Hypothesis in a new theoretical universe

(3) Di Sciullo & Williams (1987:49) The Atomicity Thesis Words are “atomic” at the level of phrasal syntax and phrasal semantics. The words have “features,” or properties, but these features have no structure, and the relation of theses features to the internal composition of the word cannot be relevant in syntax – this is the thesis of the atomicity of words, or the lexical integrity hypothesis, or the strong lexicalist hypothesis (as in Lapointe 1980), or a version of the lexicalist hypothesis of Chomsky (1970), Williams (1978; 1978a), and numerous others.

The Lexicalist Approach to Word-Formation and the Notion of the Lexicon

The term Lexicalism refers to the theoretical standpoint in modern generative linguistics according to which the processes that form complex words (derivation and compounding) are accounted for by a set of Lexical Rules, independent of and different from the syntactic rules of the grammar (i.e. word formation is not performed by syntactic transformations). Such Lexical Rules are assumed to operate in a presyntactic component, the Lexicon. The Lexicalist approach to word-formation can be said to begin in the early 1970s with two fundamental articles: Chomsky’s Remarks on Nominalizations (1970) and Halle’s Prolegomena to a Theory of Word Formation (1973). Since then, lexicalism developed in a linear and constant way with an impressive series of works which contributed to shape a model that – in its basic tenets – has been adopted now for more than 30 years. Siegel (1974) designed a level-based morphological model while Jackendoff (1975) explored the relation between the formal and the semantic parts of morphological operations by means of Redundancy Rules. Shortly after, Aronoff (1976) established the foundations of the whole discipline with the first comprehensive monograph in generative morphology. Focusing on derivational processes, Aronoff improved the notion of rule and developed an articulated system of restrictions in order to constrain the excessive power of Word Formation Rules (WFRs); he also envisioned the relevance of the notion of productivity and proposed a word-based morphology. Many specific studies were to follow, extending the Lexicalist approach to an evergrowing variety of languages and issues. Among them we can mention Booij (1977) on Dutch, Allen (1978) on English, Pesetsky (1979) on Russian, and Scalise (1980) on Italian. Still, numerous other publications introduced new fundamental concepts which contributed to build up a complete and consistent morphological theory: for example, Lieber (1980) proposed the mechanism of “feature percolation”, Williams (1981) formulated an important generalization on morphological heads, Selkirk (1982) refined the “level ordering hypothesis”, Anderson (1982), brought inflectional morphology into the picture. This list of publications is far from being

Complement selection in morphology and syntax

In this paper we discuss a recent proposal according to which: (1)derivational suffixes have a syntactic-like bar representation and (2) wordformation processes can be represented in terms of an X-bar syntax. Whilewe agree on the attribution of an argument structure to suffixes, we castsome doubt on the claim that such word-constituents are Complements of their(suffixal) selecting heads. We maintain that suffixes do not project as lexicalheads do and that a congurational X-bar structure in word formation is usefulonly to the extent that it represents the semantics (i.e., the LCS) of thewords selected by the suffix.