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
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.
Published online: 5 November 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.00026.cle
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.00026.cle
Abstract
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
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Cited by (4)
Cited by four other publications
Caha, Pavel, Karen De Clercq & Guido Vanden Wyngaerd
Wiland, Bartosz
Blix, Hagen
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