Structuring Sense: Volume III: Taking Form

Abstract

This book is volume III of a trilogy which explores the difference between words however defined and structures however constructed. The trilogy sets out to demonstrate that the explanation of linguistic competence should be shifted from lexical entries to syntactic structure, from the memorizing of listed information to the manipulation of grammatical rules. Its reformulation of how grammar and listed items interact has profound implications for linguistic, philosophical, and psychological theories about the human mind and language. The book departs from both constructional approaches to syntax and the long generative tradition that uses the word as the nucleus around which the syntax grows. It argues that the hierarchical, abstract structures of language are universal, not language specific, and that language variation emerges from the morphological and phonological properties of grammatical functors, or more specifically, inflection. This volume applies this approach to the construction of complex words. The book develops a new model of word formation, arguing that the basic building blocks of language are on the one hand rigid semantic and syntactic functions, and on the other hand, roots, which in themselves are but packets of phonological information, and are devoid of both meaning and grammatical properties of any kind. Within such a model, syntactic category, syntactic selection and argument structure are all mediated through syntactic structures projected from rigid functions, or alternatively, constructed through general combinatorial principles of syntax, such as Chomsky's Merge. The meaning of ‘words’, in turn, does not involve the existence of lexemes, but rather the matching of a well-defined and phonologically articulated syntactic domain with conceptual Content, itself outside the domain of language as such. In a departure from most current models of syntax but in line with many philosophical traditions, then, the Exo-Skeletal model partitions ‘meaning’ into formal functions, on the one hand, and Content, on the other hand. While the former are read off syntactico-semantic structures as is usually assumed, Content is crucially read off syntactico-phonological structures.

Language Mixing and Diachronic Change: American Norwegian Noun Phrases Then and Now

“…The term "exoskeletal" unites a family of grammatical analyses [38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48]. These works may differ in terms of how they account for details in the syntactic structure and its derivation, but the shared, fundamental core is the assumption that abstract syntactic structures are generated independently of the lexical items that will realize them.…”

“…These approaches are all motivated by monolingual data, meaning that they are not specially designed to handle language mixing, but do nevertheless prove to be good analytical tools for bilingual grammars. The specific model employed in the current article relates mainly to the works by Borer [31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43], Åfarli [44], Lohndal [46,47], and Marantz [38,39]. Additionally, the current approach also incorporates insights from Distributed Morphology (DM), e.g., [49][50][51], especially concerning the process of late insertion, which I will discuss below.…”

The location of gender features in the syntax

“…The verb ‘to hammer’ would be formed by adding a v to the root √ hammer:

This type of analysis is known as lexical decomposition because it decomposes lexical categories into a root and a categorizing head. Lexical decomposition is often associated with Distributed Morphology (see e.g., Marantz, , ; Arad, , , among many others), but it is by no means limited to this framework (see e.g., Borer, , ; Fathi & Lowenstamm, ).…”

“…With respect to gender, the lexical decomposition literature agrees that syntactic gender features are not located solely on the root. Roots are most often assumed to lack grammatical features like gender altogether (Borer, , :264; Acquaviva, ), and putting nominal gender features on a root also severely undermines the idea that roots are category‐neutral (Acquaviva, ). Moreover, nouns like artista ‘artist’ in Spanish can be interpreted as referring to a male artist or a female artist, and nouns like this would be forced to have two synonymous, homophonous roots with different gender features—a non‐optimal state of affairs given how common these nouns are across and within languages (Kramer, :32–33).…”

Generalized applicatives: Reassessing the lexical–functional divide

“…The existence of phonologically null roots is problematic for the proposal of Borer (2013) to identify roots with their phonology, rather than by an index as Harley proposes.…”