English Argumental Compounds and Wordfixation

Abstract

English compounds like ‘truck driver’ and ‘truck maker’ show an interesting property: the non-head is an internal argument of the base verbs ‘drive’ and ‘make’. The compounds belong to a subclass called ‘synthetic,’ ‘deverbal,’ or ‘argumental.’ Writers have proposed theories to simplify grammar by assuming that the Thetarole Projection Principle works both in morphology and syntax. I will analyze the principle in detail, and demonstrate that it has critical limits. The principle should be revised to the extent that the revision undermines basic schemes of the principle. Instead, I will show with empirical evidence that ‘truck driver’ is a root compound. And it is also true of ‘truck maker’, except that ‘truck driver’ is coined by concatenating two free lexical words, while ‘truck maker’ is a product of the process of attaching a bound stem ‘maker’ to the base ‘truck’, wordfixation.