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On the question of lexical regularity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Robert E. Beard
Robert E. Beard
Affiliation:
Bucknell University
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Extract

In a recent article on the indivisibility of ‘words’ (Sampson, 1979), Geoffrey Sampson, in arguing against the semantic decomposition of ‘vocabulary items’, concludes with a claim against lexical decomposability of derived items such as Nixonite, etc. One can hardly take issue, I think, with his argument against the purely semantic decomposition of lexical primes; however, it does not follow from this that the lexicon is characterized by unproductive, irregular rules or a total absence thereof: …it seems factually untrue that rules of derivational morphology (such as the rule for forming nouns in -ite) can be assimilated to semantically regular, productive ‘rules of grammar’ such as the rule for pluralizing nouns; the former rules are typically not fully productive, and the meanings of the words produced are not in general predictable (46).

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , March 1981 , pp. 31 - 37
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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References

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