Noun Incorporation and the Lexicalist Hypothesis

Abstract

Many recent and not so recent debates on noun incorporation (NI) pit a syntactic analysis (Baker, 1988, 1996, Haugen, 2008, Sadock, 1980, 1986) against a lexical origin (Di Sciullo and Williams, 1987, Rosen, 1989) of NI constructions. Within the past 10 years or so, many researchers have abandoned any sort of generative lexicon in favour of the so-called single-engine hypothesis in which word formation is handled strictly in the syntax, with the possibility of some post-syntactic re-arrangements (Halle & Marantz, 1993; Julien, 2002; Marantz, 1997, 2001; inter alia). The goal of this paper is to examine how these discussions on NI bear on the Lexicalist Hypothesis. I show that a separate morphological module is not only unnecessary, but also unparsimonious in explaining NI.