Abstract
Chomsky's (1970) analysis of English nominalizations has ~roved to be controverSl. aI l.P many. respec t s. ( l) Be y.o nd dl' spute, h owever, l.S th e fact t h a t this analysis has (re-)kindled the interest of many linguists in the aspect of linguistic structure known as morphoiogy or word-formation. (2) Thus, during the past decade, Chomsky's lexicalist hypothesis(3) has served as a point of departure for various attempts at developing theories which aim to give an account of the structure and/or formation of morphologically complex words. (4)
Highlights
Chomsky's (1970) analysis of English nominalizations has ~roved to be controverSl.aI l.P many. respec t s. ( l) Bey.ond dl' spute, l.S th e fact t h at this analysis haskindled the interest of many linguists in the aspect of linguistic structure known as "morphoiogy" or "word-formation". (2) during the past decade, Chomsky's lexicalist hypothesis(3) has served as a point of departure for various attempts at developing theories which aim to give an account of the structure and/or formation of morphologically complex words. (4)These so-called lexicalist theories of word-formation/structure differ from each other in many respects, some of "hich are nontrivial. (5) All of them, use the same basic kind of descriptive device, viz. word formation rules (: word format ion rules (WFRs)), to account for the phenomen~ within their domain
In the preceding sections it has been argued that Roeper and Siegel's theory of verbal compounding exhibits the following major shortcomings: 1. Roeper and Siegel's notion "verb al compound" is ill-defined, with the result that they are unable (a) to draw a principled distinction between, on the one hand, verbal compounds and, on the other hand, root compounds and certain complex derivatives; (b) to motivate their lexical transformation analysis vis-a-vis an adjunction analysis in a non-ad hoc manner
The formal devices proposed by Roeper and Siegel for the derivation of verbal compounds exhibit a variety of undesirable properties
Summary
Chomsky's (1970) analysis of English nominalizations has ~roved to be controverSl.aI l.P many. respec t s. ( l) Bey.ond dl' spute, l.S th e fact t h at this analysis has (re-)kindled the interest of many linguists in the aspect of linguistic structure known as "morphoiogy" or "word-formation". (2) during the past decade, Chomsky's lexicalist hypothesis(3) has served as a point of departure for various attempts at developing theories which aim to give an account of the structure and/or formation of morphologically complex words. (4). The idea that WFRs should be allowed to apply to syntactic phrases has so far been consistently opposed by lexicalist morphologists This idea was once again rejected recently by Allen (1978:253) in her analysis of the way in which words such as two'handed, eight~sided, many~eyed and four-cornered are formed. Her position is that " is the conclusion that -ed must attach outside phrases a theoretically improbable one, but it makes empirically incorrect predictions" It would be of some general interest if the present study could present a plausible case for allowing WFRs to form morphologically complex words on the basis of (at least one well-defined class of) syntactic structures.
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