Word Formation in a Modular Theory of Grammar: Postsyntactic Compounds in Japanese

要旨

A new type of noun + verb compound formation is attested in Japanese which involves a sentential structure as its input and presumably takes place in the phonological component. This ‘postsyntactic’ compounding serves not only to weaken the strong lexicalist hypothesis but also to elucidate problems surrounding the delicate and controversial issue of where word formation processes take place. The discovery that morphological constraints that have hitherto been believed to characterize lexically formed words also apply to postsyntactic compounds leads us to dissociate these constraints from the lexicon and set them up as an independent system of general principles that constrain word formation processes in various components in a global manner. The proposed word formation model thus instantiates Chomsky's modular conception of grammatical organization.

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