LFG List - query on LIH

[wechsler at mail.utexas.edu]

At 3:07 AM 4/1/98, Dick Hudson wrote:

>dh: Isn't the LIH the same as the principle of morphology-free syntax
>(sister of phonology-free syntax) that Zwicky and Pullum have been
>advocating for many years? E.g. Zwicky 1992, Some choices in the theory of
>morphology. In R. Levine (ed.) Formal Grammar: Theory and implementation,
>OUP, 327-71, especially 354. Indeed, isn't it inherent in any monostratal
>analysis which generates surface structures directly?

The answer to the last question is no.  A system of rewriting rules for
generating sentences where the terminals are morphemes instead of words
would be monostratal and would generate surface structures directly, but it
would massively violate the LIH.  If I recall correctly, precisely such a
theory was proposed by Zelig Harris (1946, 'From Morpheme to Utterance'
Language 22).

Steve

Prof. Stephen Wechsler, Linguistics Dept.
U of Texas, Austin, TX 78712-1196
http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~wechsler/
CAL 403, office hrs Wed 2-5. (512)471-1701