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

[Martha McGinnis]

Andrew's answer is interesting. He says he doesn't see the relevance to DM
of sentences-as-adjectives in English. The relevance to DM, as I see it,
is knowing how DM could generate these, what Andrew calls, 'phrasal'
words. If the only means of word-formation are Vocabulary Item insertion
and Head Movement, then I cannot see how phrasal words can be formed.If
that is correct, then DM would thus still be bound by a rather strong
version of the 'Lexicalist Hypothesis'. I am betting that DM has no easy
solution and that the problem will turn out to be the exocentricity of
phrasal words. That is, the immediate constituent of a 'phrasal word'
doesn't match the label of the category under which it occurs in the tree
(a sentence in Adjective position, for example will provoke severe
complications in explaining how it got there - although Andrew Carnie's
thesis offers some suggestions, where Carnie allows phrases under X0s).

The specific problem I have in mind comes from Wari' quotatives, in which
the quotative phrase functions as the verb of the sentence. This is
documented in my chapter in the Handbook of Morphology and also in the
Everett & Kern grammar of Wari from Routledge. There is strong evidence in
Wari, however, that not even Carnie's proposal (form a phrase and move it
into X0) will work, since movement is fairly carefully marked in Wari, but
quotatives show no signs of movement.

I am sure that this is all too sketchy to make a great deal of. But I am
hoping to finish a paper on this in the next few weeks. The problem seems
to be the need to recognize exocentric constructions motivated directly by
the semantics, both requirements hard to state in formal theories (like
DM). Well, anyway, that is what the paper claims. More on that when it is
available.

Back to Andrew C-M's proposal. On the other hand, I am not sure how a new
category of 'phrasal word' would help at all. The concept needs to be
formalized. Perhaps this is done in Andrew's forthcoming book.I look
forward to reading it.

Dan Everett
Research Professor of Phonetics and Phonology
University of Manchester