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Article published In:
Linguistics in the Netherlands 2019
Edited by Janine Berns and Elena Tribushinina
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 36] 2019
► pp. 99–114
Part II: Selected papers presented at the Dutch Annual Linguistics Day of 2019

On the idiomatic nature of unproductive morphology

| Ghent University/FWO
| KU Leuven
We present a case study in the marking of the negative prefix in French gradable adjectives, where the productive marker iN- alternates with a number of unproductive prefixes, like dé(s)-, dis-, mal-, mé(s)-. We treat this as a classical case of allomorphy, and present an account of the distribution of these allomorphs in terms of the nanosyntactic mechanism of pointers, by which lexical items may point to other, existing, lexical items in the postsyntactic lexicon. We claim that unproductive lexical items are not directly accessible for the spellout mechanism, but only indirectly, via pointers. We show how the analysis accounts for lexicalised semantics in derivations, as well as cases where the formal relationship between derivational pairs is not concatenative, but substitutive.
Keywords: morphology, productivity, negation, nanosyntax
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The data
    • 2.1The productive negative marker: iN-
    • 2.2The unproductive prefixes
  • 3.Prerequisites
  • 4.Pointers
  • 5.Analysis
    • 5.1Allomorph distribution
    • 5.2Nonderived adjectives
    • 5.3Idiomaticity
    • 5.4Substitutive morphology
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 5 November 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.00026.cle
References (11)
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Cited by (4)

Cited by four other publications

Caha, Pavel, Karen De Clercq & Guido Vanden Wyngaerd
2023. Zero morphology and change-of-state verbs. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 42:1 ► pp. 35 ff. DOI logo
Wiland, Bartosz
2023. Polish Comparative Adjectives and Adverbs. Studies in Polish Linguistics 18:3 ► pp. 97 ff. DOI logo
Blix, Hagen
2022. Interface Legibility and Nominal Classification: A Nanosyntactic Account of Kipsigis Singulatives. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 7:1 DOI logo
Caha, Pavel
2022. THE MARKING OF MASS, COUNT AND PLURAL DENOTATIONS IN MULTI‐DIMENSIONAL PARADIGMS*. Studia Linguistica 76:1 ► pp. 212 ff. DOI logo

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