Compositionality, lexical integrity, and agglutinative morphology

Abstract

Based on morphological phenomena found mostly in Japanese, a highly agglutinative language, this paper investigates how we might approach intra-word compositionality in a manner faithful to lexical integrity. First, we observe some word-formation phenomena that seem to apparently contradict lexical (or morphological) integrity and ‘direct compositionality’. These involve mismatches -- bracketing paradoxes -- between morphological constituency vis-à-vis syntactic or semantic constituency. We also survey how researchers have dealt or would deal with instances of such mismatches. Upon concluding that these mismatches are not obstacles to direct compositionality or lexical integrity, an even more drastic bracketing paradox, namely, the one involving the sized inalienable possession construction is introduced as a case study to give the concept of direct compositionality a further stress test. The viability and, arguably, advantage of a direct compositional semantically-oriented (as opposed to syntactic) approach to word-formation is demonstrated. Finally, after a summary of the paper, further conceptual issues regarding compositionality and word-formation are taken up.