status of words; HPSG, CG

[Farrell Ackerman]

Andreas Kathol wrote:
 > > You may want to look at Krieger and Nerbonne's (1993?) treatment of
 > > _-bar_ affixation in terms of a morphological combinatorial system
 > > that parallels that of syntax. The disadvantages of such an approach
 > > have been discussed extensively by Susanne Riehemann. More recently,
 > > Stefan Mueller (talk at Trondheim HPSG conference) has proposed a
 > > treatment of German separable prefixes in which valence information is
 > > either "cashed out" syntactically (prefix as a separate syntactic
 > > unit) or morphologically (prefix as part of a lexical word). His work
 > > may come closer to what you're interested in because is looks like it
 > > could provide a model of how to deal with the Cree cases.

You may also want to investigate the tradition in Word and Paradigm
models of morphology or what Stump 20001 refers to as
"inferential-realizational"
models of morphology more generally: within these models, as in traditional
pedagogical texts, inflectional paradigms can have cells occupied by
multi-word expressions,
i.e., periphrastic expressions, (Robbins 1959, Matthews 1991, among others)
as well as by single word expressions, i.e., synthetic expressions;
derivational
paradigms (think of german separable verb constructions) can also have have
surface expressions that are either synthetic or periphrastic.  of course,
it is
periphrastic expressions that raise questions concerning the standard
interpretation
of lexicalism within constraint-based lexicalist frameworks.  there are
numerous
linguists over the past few years who have been trying to address the
challenging issues of wordhood
by examining periphrasis within both inflection and derivation and
attempting, among
other things, to identify criteria that would distinguish between "lexical
constructions"
versus "syntactic" ones.  this work has been done mostly from the
perspective of
developing realizational-based theories of morphology designed to interface
with
constraint based lexicalist theories.  in this line of research there's work
by webelhuth and me (a theory of predicates 1998, which provides an explicit
acccount of a constructional perspective on lexicalism - this is referred to
as "realization-based lexicalism" in blevins 2001), as well as borjars et.
al. 1998, mohanan 1995, frank 1997(?), numerous recent
articles by andrew spencer (downloadable from his webpage), an article by
sadler and spencer (downloadable off louisa's webpage), several articles by
geert booij (including a recent talk he'll give at the barcelona morphology
conference), several articles by greg stump (some of which are listed on his
webpage, some articles by peter sells (downloadable from
his website).... (of course there are others working on this (some them
cited in
the bibliographies of the particlar articles by the linguists just mentioned -
i apologize to the numerousl folks i failed to mention.)

regards to everyone, farrell