Transposition and the Limits of Word Formation

Abstract

In the discussion of the borderline between word formation and inflection, change of category is often taken to be a sufficient, non-necessary condition for word formation. Transposition is a term from the European tradition of linguistics for the change of category without any change in meaning. In Jackendoff’s Parallel Architecture (PA), syntactic information and conceptual information are represented in structures that are linked to but not dependent on each other. I argue that word formation rules should not be treated in the same way as syntactic rules or lexical entries in PA, but assigned to a separate word formation component. The question is, then, which rules should be in the word formation component.