Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy: Word formation constraints (reply to Dan Everett)

[Martha McGinnis]

>Folks,
>
>How does DM handle the kinds of adjectives that Lieber discusses in
>several places, e.g. 'She's an I-don't -care-who-said-it-I'm-going-anyway
>kind of jungle explorer'? LFG treats these as idioms, which I think is
>highly implausible. They seem quite productive.

I've pondered these quite a lot for the purpose of teaching
morphology and also while writing a textbook on English
word-formation (which should come out from Edinburgh University Press
this year).  It seems to me that one needs a separate category of
(what I call) 'phrasal words': complex items that function
syntactically as words, yet whose internal structure is that of a
clause or phrase rather than a compound.

This distinction between structure and function echoes DiSciullo and
Williams's distinction between syntactic atoms and morphological
objects.  It provides a handy way of handling the difference as
regards plural formation between e.g. _bother-in-law_ and
_jack-in-the-box_.  The former, with plural _brothers-in-law_, is not
a (compound) word at all (despite the hyphens in the spelling!), but
an idiomatic phrase (or phrasal idiom).  The latter, with plural
_jack-in-the-boxes_, is a phrasal word (and an idiom too).

Being an idiom, as I see it, is a matter of whether (or to what
extent) the meaning of the whole is predictable from that of its
parts.  ('To what extent' implies that idiomaticity is a matter of
degree, which seems correct to me.)  That's independent of whether
the kind of structure that the parts enter into is syntactic or
morphological.  So I agree with Dan that it is unsatisfactory just to
toss phrasal words into an 'idiom' category.  His example illustrates
a phrasal word that, unlike _jack-in-the-box_, is not an idiom.

I don't know that there's much here that bears on DM in particular --
except this, perhaps: even though the way in which word-internal
structure is typically represented in DM discussions is via labelled
branching trees, nevertheless this sort of morphological tree
structure should not be too hastily equated with syntactic structure.

Andrew
--
Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy
Professor and Acting Head of Department
Department of Linguistics, University of Canterbury, Private Bag
4800, Christchurch, New Zealand
phone (work) +64-3-364 2211; (home) +64-3-355 5108
fax +64-3-364 2969
e-mail a.c-mcc at ling.canterbury.ac.nz
http://www.ling.canterbury.ac.nz/adc-m.html