Synthetic Compounds

Abstract

AbstractThe final chapter brings together the syntactic structure of nominals as discussed in Part I and the model of complex word formation, as discussed in Part II. Synthetic Compounds, although prima facie consisting of a verbal nexus and an argument of the verb, nonetheless are extremely problematic for all syntactic accounts of word formation. Contra Borer and others, they appear to have an internal argument without event structure. Contra Marantz and others, they allow N-ing without an event structure either. And finally, any attempt to derive them by assuming the incorporation of an internal argument is directly incompatible with the unaccusative hypothesis. In a careful analysis, it is shown that Synthetic Compounds cannot be considered a species of AS-nominals, that they do not have event structure and that what appears as an argument is but a free-interpretation modifier. Most strikingly, if Synthetic Compounds are not AS-nominals, but rather R-nominals, we expect them to allow non-compositional Content matching, and as such, to differ sharply from AS-nominals. The prediction, in turn, is directly correct (e.g. ‘shop lifting’ vs. ‘*;the lifting of the shop’). What we have here, then, is the non-trivial correlation of the absence of event structure and event interpretation with the availability of atomic Content, for Synthetic Compounds, contrasted with the presence of event structure and the obligatoriness of compositional Content for AS-nominals. This provides direct evidence for the correlation of Content matching with the absence of ExP-segments, for the requirement of ExP-segments for event interpretation to emerge, and by extension, for the syntactic derivation of complex words.