Lexical Integrity, Checking, and the Mirror: A Checking Approach to Syntactic Word Formation

Abstract

Admitting syntactic formation of morphologically complex words is commonly deemed to be an infringement on the Lexical Integrity Hypothesis. But syntactic word formation, if understood in terms of the checking of features of subparts of words in designated syntactic positions, is readily reconciled with strong lexicalism. This paper will argue that a checking approach to syntactic word formation, in tandem with a novel interpretation of the Mirror Principle of Baker (1985), yields a straightforward resolution of the otherwise problematic inflectional morphology of the Athapaskan languages, as well as of ‘bracketing paradoxes’ of the unhappier and ungrammaticality type. The syntactically complex structure of unhappier and ungrammaticality that underlies the checking approach to syntactic word formation is supported on the basis of evidence from polarity item licensing, adverbial modification, and so-anaphora.