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Syntax versus the lexicon: incorporation and compounding in Modern Greek

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 1998

JANE C. SMIRNIOTOPOULOS  and
BRIAN D. JOSEPH
JANE C. SMIRNIOTOPOULOS
Affiliation:
The Ohio State University
BRIAN D. JOSEPH
Affiliation:
The Ohio State University
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Abstract

As a contribution to the long-standing controversy in linguistics concerning the proper role in the grammar of syntax as opposed to the lexicon and of syntax as opposed to morphology, we study here the proposal made by Rivero 1992 that Modern Greek has a productive syntactic rule of Adverb Incorporation, and more generally Argument Incorporation. Based on measures of productivity and on idiosyncrasies in meaning that adverb-plus-verb and object-plus-verb combinations in Greek show, we argue that the phenomena in question are compounds or affixed forms that result from the operation of lexical rules. They are thus quintessentially morphological in nature, rather than syntactic. More generally, we see this outcome as an argument against frameworks in which morphology is collapsed into the syntactic component and in which morphology is not a separate component of grammar.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , September 1998 , pp. 447 - 488
Copyright
1998 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

We would like to thank Eva Konstantellou and Panayiotis Pappas, who served as our primary consultants, as well as Anastasia Christofides, all of whose native judgments were extremely valuable to our research. In addition, we thank Craig Hilts for his help in the preparation of the final manuscript. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Workshop on Greek Linguistics at the LSA Institute (Columbus, August 1993), at the Georgetown University Round Table Greek Linguistics Presession (Washington DC, March 1994), at the Ohio State University Linguistics Department Colloquium (May 1995), and at the Second International Conference on Greek Linguistics (Salzburg, September 1995), this last being the basis for a much briefer written version in the conference proceedings (Smirniotopoulos & Joseph 1997). We benefited greatly from comments from the audiences at all of those presentations, but especially from those by Rich Janda, Artemis Alexiadou, and Gaberell Drachman. Finally, the observations of two anonymous JL referees were of considerable help to us in revising, and improving, the paper. Naturally, we take responsibility for any errors remaining in this study.