The syntactic domain of content

A main motivation for relegating Word Formation to the lexicon is the fact that its output is often non-compositional. The present article, however, presents a serious challenge to the presumed contradiction between non-compositionality and syntactic combinatorial processes. The investigation of N–N Constructs in Hebrew shows that equally syntactically complex expressions nonetheless interact differently with non-compositionality. Crucially, it is the syntactic differences between these expressions that give rise to distinct Content properties, with non-compositionality correlating not with syntactic structure as such, but with the absence of functional structure. The emerging syntactic domain of ‘word’ Content in turn allows the language learner to make informed decisions on where to look for non-compositionality and to draw the appropriate structural conclusions from its presence. Keywords: compounds; construct state nominals; genitive constructions; word formation; word compositionality

Published online: 18 April 2013
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.54.09bor