Constructional Idioms, Morphology, and the Dutch Lexicon

Abstract

Syntactic constructions may form an alternative to, or compete with the morphological expression of semantic and grammatical content. This applies to the passive forms of verbs, the progressive form, analytic causatives, adjective-noun sequences, and particle verbs in Dutch. In this article I develop a view of the Dutch lexicon in which this interaction between syntax and morphology can be understood. The central notion used is that of the constructional idiom, a construction with a (partially) non-compositional meaning, of which not all terminal elements are fixed. These constructional idioms, like morphological word formation, serve to extend the fund of expressions that are available for concatenation in the syntax. * Introduction.It is well known that syntactic structures sometimes perform the same function as morphological structures in the same or another language. Periphrasis is the standard term for this morphological function of syntactic units within the inflectional system of a language. In the domain of word formation, linguists often contrast analytic constructions with synthetic constructions, and distinguish, for instance, between analytic causatives (multiword units) and synthetic, that is, morphological causatives.In this paper I argue that the notion "constructional idiom" should be used in order to get a better insight into the kind of syntactic expressions that function as alternatives to morphological expressions. The basic claim is that it is syntactic expressions that qualify as constructional idioms that play a role in the division of labor between syntax and morphology.

Compound or phrase? Analogy in naming

“…In contrast, a template or schema within the lexicon can account for the productivity of these phrases as lexical items and -via inheritance relations -also for their formal agreement with regular syntactic phrases. Such an analysis as constructional schema has been proposed by Booij (2002Booij ( , 2009aBooij ( , 2009bBooij ( , 2010b.…”

A Realization Optimality Theory approach to blocking and extended morphological exponence

“…We argue that *FEATURE SPLIT, which unifies blocking and extended exponence, cannot be replaced by alignment constraints (McCarthy & Prince 1993a, Russell 1997, Grimshaw 2001. We show that Realization OT does not conflict with constructional approaches to morphology (Booij 2002(Booij , 2005(Booij , 2007(Booij , 2008(Booij , 2009Blevins 2006 ;Harris 2009) under which lexical specifications are required to describe extended exponence. We compare Realization OT with diachronic approaches to extended exponence and argue that there is no necessary discrepancy between them in that diachronic models may conform to the same mechanism of deriving extended exponence as in Realization OT.…”

On the Systematic Variation of German Idioms: Converse Pairs as a Constructional Phenomenon

“…Cf. especially (Kay and Fillmore, 1999;Booij, 2002;Feilke, 2007;Fillmore, 2006;Dobrovol'skij, 2011b;Ziem and Lasch 2013).…”