In:Minimalism and Beyond: Radicalizing the interfaces
Edited by Peter Kosta, Steven L. Franks, Teodora Radeva-Bork and Lilia Schürcks
[Language Faculty and Beyond 11] 2014
► pp. 287–303
A minimalist approach to roots
Published online: 24 September 2014
https://doi.org/10.1075/lfab.11.11pan
https://doi.org/10.1075/lfab.11.11pan
The necessity for roots to be categorized in syntax is recast as an interface condition, resulting from the SEM-deficient character of free acategorial roots. The question of how much descriptive content roots (may) bear is linked to the idiomatic, non-compositional interpretation of the First Phase. The consequences of such a version of syntactic decomposition of words for the morphological realization of roots are outlined, as well as this account’s compatibility with conceptual atomism.
References (55)
Acquaviva, Paolo. 2008. Roots and Lexicality in Distributed Morphology. Paper given at the Fifth York-Essex Morphology Meeting
, [URL].
. 2009. “The roots of nominality, the nominality of roots.” Unpublished Ms., University College Dublin.
Acquaviva, Paolo and Panagiotidis, Phoevos. 2012. “Lexical decomposition meets conceptual atomism.” Lingue e Linguaggio XI(2): 105–120.
Alexiadou, Artemis. 2001. Functional Structure in Nominals: Nominalization and Ergativity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Alexiadou, Artemis and Anagnostopoulou, Elena. 2008. “Structuring participles.” In Proceedings of the 26th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, Charles B. Chang and Hannah J. Haynie (eds), 33–41. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Anagnostopoulou, Elena and Samioti, Yota. 2009. Domains for Idioms. Paper presented at the Roots II Workshop,
University of Stuttgart.
Arad, Maya. 2003. “Locality constraints on the interpretation of roots: The case of Hebrew denominal verbs.” Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 2: 737–778.
Baker, Mark. 2003. Lexical Categories: Verbs, Nouns and Adjectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Basilico, D. 2008. “Particle verbs and benefactive double objects in English: High and low attachments.” Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 26: 731–729.
Boeckx, Cedric. 2010. “Defeating lexicocentrism.” Unpublished Ms., ICREA, Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona.
Borer, Hagit. 2003. “Exo-skeletal vs. endo-skeletal explanations: syntactic projections and the lexicon.” In The Nature of Explanation in Linguistic Theory, John Moore and Maria Polinsky (eds), 31–67. Stanford: CSLI.
. 2009. Roots and Categories. Paper presented at the 19th Colloquium on Generative Grammar
. University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz.
Chomsky, Noam. 1970. “Remarks on nominalization.” In Readings in English Transformational Grammar, Roderick Jacobs and Peter Rosenbaum (eds), 184–221. Waltham, MA.: Ginn & Company.
De Belder, Marijke. 2011. Roots and Affixes: Eliminating Lexical Categories from Syntax. Utrecht: LOT.
Embick, David. 2000. “Features, syntax, and categories in the Latin perfect.” Linguistic Inquiry 31: 185–230.
Raffaella, Folli, Harley, Heidi and Karimi, Simin. 2003. “Determinants of event type in Persian complex predicates.” In Cambridge Occasional Papers in Linguistics, Luisa Astruc and Marc Richards (eds), 1: 100–120. Cambridge: University of Cambridge.
Fodor, Jerry. 1970. “Three reasons for not deriving ‘kill’ from ‘cause to die’.” Linguistic Inquiry 1: 429–438.
Fodor, Jerry and Lepore, Ernest. 1996. “The red herring and the pet fish: why concepts still can’t be prototypes.” Cognition 58: 253–270.
. 1998. “The emptiness of the lexicon, critical reflections on James Pustejovsky’s ‘The generative Lexicon’.” Linguistic Inquiry 29: 269–288.
Galani, Alexandra. 2005. “The morphosyntax of verbs in Modern Greek.” Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of York.
Hale, Kenneth and Keyser, Samuel Jay. 1993. “On argument structure and the lexical expression of syntactic relations.” In The View from Building 20, Kenneth Hale and Samuel Jay Keyser (eds), 53–109. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Harley, Heidi. 2005a. “How do verbs get their names? Denominal verbs, Manner Incorporation and the ontology of verb roots in English.” In The Syntax of Aspect: Deriving Thematic and Aspectual Interpretation, Nomi Erteschik-Shir and Tova Rapoport (eds), 42–64. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
. 2005b. “Bare phrase structure, a-categorial roots, one-replacement and unaccusativity.” In Harvard Working Papers on Linguistics 9, Slava Gorbachov and Andrew Nevins (eds), 1–19. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
. 2007. The Bipartite Structure of Verbs Cross-Linguistically, or Why Mary Can’t Exhibit John her Paintings. Talk presented at the
2007 ABRALIN Congres
in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, March 2007.
. 2009. “The morphology of nominalizations and the syntax of vP.” In Quantification, Definiteness, and Nominalization, Anastasia Giannakidou and Monika Rathert (eds), 320–342. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harley, Heidi and Noyer, Rolf. 2000. “Formal versus encyclopedic properties of vocabulary: Evidence from nominalisations.” In The Lexicon-Encyclopedia Interface, Bert Peeters (ed.), 349–374. Current Research in the Semantics/pragmatics Interface v. 5. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Kiparsky, Paul. 1982. “Word-formation and the lexicon.” In Proceedings of the Mid-America Linguistics Conference, F. Ingemann (ed.). Lawrence, Kansas.
Lowenstamm, Jean. 2008. “On n, √, and types of nouns.” In Sounds of silence: empty elements in syntax and phonology. [North Holland Linguistic Series, Linguistic Variations Volume 63]. 107–144. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Marantz, Alec. 1997. “No escape from syntax: Don’t try morphological analysis in the privacy of your own lexicon.” University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 4: 201–225.
Panagiotidis, Phoevos. 2005. “Against category-less roots in syntax and word learning: objections to Barner and Bale (2002).” Lingua 115: 1181–1194.
. 2014. Categorial Features: A generative theory of word class categories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pullum, Geoffrey. 2010. “Pullum 2010. Isms, gasms, etc.” The Language Log. [URL].
Siddiqi, Daniel. 2006. “Minimize Exponence: Economy Effects on a Model of the Morphosyntactic Component of the Grammar.” Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Arizona.
Svenonius, Peter. 2005. “Idioms and domain boundaries.” Unpublished Ms., CASTL, University of Tromsø.
Volpe, Mark. 2009. “Root and deverbal nominalizations: Lexical flexibility in Japanese.” Unpublished Ms., available from [URL].
Cited by (10)
Cited by ten other publications
Borg, Emma
Carston, Robyn
Carston, Robyn
Steriopolo, Olga, Giorgos Markopoulos & Vassilios Spyropoulos
Nóbrega, Vitor A. & Phoevos Panagiotidis
Saab, Andrés & Nicolás Lo Guercio
Revithiadou, Anthi, Giorgos Markopoulos & Vassilios Spyropoulos
Armoskaite, Solveiga & Päivi Koskinen
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 25 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
