The lexical integrity hypothesis (LIH) or lexical integrity principle is a hypothesis in linguistics which states that syntactic transformations do not apply to subparts of words. It functions as a constraint on transformational grammar.
Words are analogous to atoms in that, from the point of view of syntax, words do not have any internal structure and are impenetrable by syntactic operations.[1] The ideas of this theory are complicated when considering the hierarchical levels of word formation and the broad variation in defining what constitutes a word, and when words are inserted.[2]
Different theories have been proposed by linguists to further refine this theory in order to account for cross-linguistic challenges to the LIH. Two linguists, Joan Bresnan of Stanford University and Sam Mchombo of the University of California, Berkeley, maintain the idea of words as unanalyzable units; Bresnan & Mchombo (1995) re-evaluate this theory using evidence from Bantu to resolve clitics' apparent violations of the LIH. They concluded that clitics and their prosodic word hosts are separate entities, thus stipulating that the hypothesis does not govern the prosodic word, but rather, the morphosyntactic word.
It is also incompatible with Arrernte, a language spoken in the Alice Springs area of Australia. Arrernte reportedly has initial separation where "the first two, or rarely three syllables of a verb can optionally be separated from the remainder of the verb. Intervening material seems to be limited to particles, clitics, pronouns, and simple NPs." (Henderson 2002) [4]
History
The LIH is a subset of the lexicalist hypothesis, which states that morphology and syntax do not interact,[5] with the result (among others) that some syntactic operations cannot access word-internal structures.[6]
This theory appears to have no single source from which it originates.[7] Despite being widely referred to and debated in linguistics, there is no single attributable source for the Lexical Integrity Hypothesis,[1] nor does there seem to be any single definition, which potentially poses problems for this theory's falsifiability.[citation needed] The hypothesis seems to come about from the consensus that there is a phenomenon that generally and cross-linguistically prevents or limits the interaction between syntax and morphology.
Though not referred to by name, the earliest theoretical beginnings of the LIH seems to be from Siegel (1974),[8] while linguist Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy attributes it to Bresnan & Mchombo (1995),[9] even though Bresnan and Mchombo themselves refer to the lexical integrity principle as a given concept within the linguistics canon.[6]
While today they are generally distinct theories, the LIH is historically referred to interchangeably with the lexicalist hypothesis,[10][11] making the origin of the LIH as a concept distinct from the lexicalist hypothesis difficult to pinpoint.
However, Bruening (2018) attributes the lexicalist hypothesis, of which the LIH is a subset, to Chomsky (1970).[12]
Interaction between syntax and morphology: Theoretical variations
One of the biggest challenges to defining the LIH is in identifying the domain that syntax governs, the domain that morphology governs, and how these two constructs interact. Questions to be entertained, for example, are what constitutes a word and the point in which lexical insertion merges with sentence-level operations. Di Sciullo & Williams (1987) is frequently used as a foundation for many explorations of the LIH. In this book, linguists Anna Maria Di Sciullo and Edwin S. Williams explore the concept of word atomicity, as well as the framing of syntax within the idea of a "sentence form" wherein sentences are skeletal placeholders of lexical items, such as listemes,[13] which are lexical constituents that are stored in the lexicon as opposed to generated by rules. [14]
Booij (2009) redefines LIH as a principle that excludes two interactions between syntax and morphology: having access to word-internal structure, and being able to manipulate parts of word-internal structure--where manipulation is the syntactic movement, or the splitting of a word-constituent. He asserts that for a lexical unit to be a word, the impossibility of such manipulation is a necessary requirement. This prohibition on movement may serve as a test to find out whether a morpheme sequence is a word, or a phrasal compound.[15]
Rochelle Lieber, a linguist at the University of New Hampshire and Sergio Scalise of the University of Bologna propose the idea of a limited access principle in which there is no hard wall between the division of syntax and morphology. Rather, there is a figurative filter that permits some syntactic operations on lexical items. This is evidenced by the fact that languages permit syntactic structures to be "downgraded" to words in that syntactic phrases can be merged into lexical items over time. [16]
Professors Antonio Fábregas of the University of Tromsø, Elena Felíu Arquiola of the University of Jaén and Soledad Varela of the Autonomous University of Madrid, use the concept of a morphological local domain in their discussion of the LIH, in which words have multiple binary branching layers composed of roots and functional projections, with the deeper layers of the morphological hierarchy being too far away for the syntax to see and only the higher head of this multi-layered morphological tree has the ability to transmit information.[17]
Additionally, some theories of syntax appear to be incompatible with the LIH, such as minimalism. Lieber and Scalise argue that Chomsky's version of strict minimalism necessitates lexical items to be fully formed before entering syntactic operations.[18]
However, Dikken (2002) proposes that syntactic and lexicalist approaches may be reconciled through a checking approach. Checking assumes words are built in the lexicon, and subparts of these words have features attached. These features are then checked to find matching features within the functional heads of the syntactic structures which the words are part of. Dikken asserts that syntax does not only refer to the internal structure of words; it also looks at the properties of subparts of complex words.[19]
Theory
English right-hand head rule (RHHR)
In English, the righthand head rule (RHHR) provides evidence for the division between the syntax and the lexical item. The properties of the head of the word, which in English tends to be the rightmost element, determines the properties of the word. The lens of syntax cannot see any other element in the word other than the head. In compounds, for example, a word like greenhouse is composed of the adjective, green, and the noun, house. The RHHR dictates that the head of the word comes from the rightmost element, which is a noun. As a result, the properties of the adjective green are invisible to the syntax. While most easily illustrated with compounds, the RHHR can also be extended to complex words and their respective suffixes.[20]
Five tests for lexical integrity: Bresnan and Mchombo
Bresnan & Mchombo (1995) identify five tests of lexical integrity which will be outlined below: extraction, conjoinability, gapping, inbound anaphoric islands and phrasal recursivity. The examples below parallel those outlined by Bresnan & Mchombo (1995).
Extraction
Syntactic operations are precluded from movement, [21] such as extracting and relocating (as in topicalization) morphological constituents.
Conjoinability
Functional categories do not undergo morphological derivation, as evidenced by failures in coordination tests:[22] syntactic categories can be coordinated but stems and affixes cannot.
Gapping
The gapping test[23] shows that the syntax is unable to "see" inside morphological constituents.
Inbound anaphoric islands
Phrases can contain pronouns that function as anaphors (referring to a previous referent) or deictics (referring to a salient entity), derived words and compounds cannot, and act as "anaphoric islands", separated from outside reference.[24]
Phrasal recursivity
This test for lexical integrity highlights how phrasal compounds may appear to be penetrable by syntactic operations, but have in fact been lexicalized. These lexical entries have the semblance of figurative quotations. Spencer (1988, 1991) lends support to the LIH through examples such as a Baroque flautist or transformational grammarian that seem to lack any conceptual counterparts, like a wooden flautist or partial grammarian.[25][26]
Criticisms
Many theorists have generated examples that seem to detract from the strength of the LIH. The LIH heavily depends on what constitutes a word or phrase, and violations to lexical integrity may occur in any given language with how they are defined.
For example, Haspelmath & Sims (2010) examines Hungarian with regards to words like meg-old [PFV-SOLVE] that are used in deverbal noun, and adjective formation.[1] Haspelmath and Sims observe that constructions involving meg tend to be single words:
meg-old
'solve'
meg-old-ás
'solution'
meg-old-hatatlan
'unsolveable'
However, they also noticed meg being detached from its affixations in certain contexts:
Pál meg-old-ott-a a problémá-t.
Paul PFV-SOLVE-PST-DEF.3SG the problem-ACC
'Paul solved the problem.'
Pál nem old-ott-a meg a problémá-t.
Paul not SOLVE-PST-DEF.3SG PFV the problem-ACC
'Paul did not solve the problem.
Haspelmath and Sims argue that the LIH is not violated in the data above if they think of megoldotta as a periphrastic construction, in which meg and oldotta are in separate syntactic nodes.[27] Assuming that a "word" here is not a "morphologically generated form", but instead "terminal syntactic nodes"—a notion adopted by Ackerman & Lesourd (1997)—lexical integrity will not be violated. However, defining what a word is seems to then be a language-specific process, and the challenge then comes from trying to label the LIH as universal.
According to Lieber (1992), phrasal compounds, especially because of their productivity, provide strong counter-evidence to the LIH. Phrasal compounds, she argues, must at least account for the phrasal categories generated by the syntax. As an example, the English possessive attaches to the end of a DP in the following example (that parallels those outlined in her book), when the most rigorous interpretation of the LIH would predict it to attach to the end of a lexical noun.
Linguist Andrew Spencer of the University of Essex expands on this idea and suggests that there is evidence, particularly in derived words in Romance languages and Dutch that morphology echoes the syntax of a language.[28]
Bresnan & Mchombo (1995), however, account for phrasal compounds by arguing that phrasal compounds are lexical entries. This proposal runs counter to Hohenhaus (1998), who argues that there are some phrasal compounds that are non-lexicalizable, such as nonce words that are spontaneously coined once and in limited contexts, such as conversations. However, even Lieber has since softened her strong position against the Lexical Integrity Hypothesis.[29]
Wiese (1996) argues that phrasal compounds do not provide counter-evidence against the LIH, as the phrasal part in such a compound constitutes something like a quotation, used as an encapsulated element. The crucial evidence here is provided by "phrasal" parts which clearly stem from a different language or even a completely different sign system, such as: the @-sign, his rien-ne-va-plus-attitude.[30]
Spencer (2005) identifies another apparent violation to the LIH in the following examples: pre- and even to some extent post-war economics, pro- as opposed to anti-war, and hypo- and not hyperglycemic. However, he also notes that there is currently wide variability, and in many respects, unpredictability, in the kinds of situations that permit the coordination of prefixes in this way.[31]
Bruening (2018) argues that phrasal syntax has access to the morphological structure of words. There are apparent cases of prefix coordination such as the one below from Chaves (2008:264):
Proponents of the LIH argue that such examples are underlying coordinated phrases (*pre-revolutionary France and post-revolutionary France*) with ellipsis of repeated material, making this a phonological and not syntactic phenomenon. However, the following examples demonstrate that the ellipsis must target morphological constituents and not just identical phonological strings. In other words, it can access the morphological structure within the words, directly contradicting the LIH.[32]
A language that seems to violate the LIH with regards to their complex predicates is Arrernte, as Henderson (2002) observes. Complex predicates in this language may have non-verbal morphemes intervening within the constituents, for example: arrernelheme is split by the word akewele ('supposedly').[33]
A lexicon is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge. In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word lexicon derives from Greek word λεξικόν, neuter of λεξικός meaning 'of or for words'.
In linguistics, morphology is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language. It analyzes the structure of words and parts of words such as stems, root words, prefixes, and suffixes. Morphology also looks at parts of speech, intonation and stress, and the ways context can change a word's pronunciation and meaning. Morphology differs from morphological typology, which is the classification of languages based on their use of words, and lexicology, which is the study of words and how they make up a language's vocabulary.
A syntactic category is a syntactic unit that theories of syntax assume. Word classes, largely corresponding to traditional parts of speech, are syntactic categories. In phrase structure grammars, the phrasal categories are also syntactic categories. Dependency grammars, however, do not acknowledge phrasal categories.
In grammar, a phrase—called expression in some contexts—is a group of words or singular word acting as a grammatical unit. For instance, the English expression "the very happy squirrel" is a noun phrase which contains the adjective phrase "very happy". Phrases can consist of a single word or a complete sentence. In theoretical linguistics, phrases are often analyzed as units of syntactic structure such as a constituent.
Phrase structure rules are a type of rewrite rule used to describe a given language's syntax and are closely associated with the early stages of transformational grammar, proposed by Noam Chomsky in 1957. They are used to break down a natural language sentence into its constituent parts, also known as syntactic categories, including both lexical categories and phrasal categories. A grammar that uses phrase structure rules is a type of phrase structure grammar. Phrase structure rules as they are commonly employed operate according to the constituency relation, and a grammar that employs phrase structure rules is therefore a constituency grammar; as such, it stands in contrast to dependency grammars, which are based on the dependency relation.
Lexical semantics, as a subfield of linguistic semantics, is the study of word meanings. It includes the study of how words structure their meaning, how they act in grammar and compositionality, and the relationships between the distinct senses and uses of a word.
In linguistics, X-bar theory is a model of phrase-structure grammar and a theory of syntactic category formation that was first proposed by Noam Chomsky in 1970 reformulating the ideas of Zellig Harris (1951), and further developed by Ray Jackendoff, along the lines of the theory of generative grammar put forth in the 1950s by Chomsky. It attempts to capture the structure of phrasal categories with a single uniform structure called the X-bar schema, basing itself on the assumption that any phrase in natural language is an XP that is headed by a given syntactic category X. It played a significant role in resolving issues that phrase structure rules had, representative of which is the proliferation of grammatical rules, which is against the thesis of generative grammar.
Lexical functional grammar (LFG) is a constraint-based grammar framework in theoretical linguistics. It posits two separate levels of syntactic structure, a phrase structure grammar representation of word order and constituency, and a representation of grammatical functions such as subject and object, similar to dependency grammar. The development of the theory was initiated by Joan Bresnan and Ronald Kaplan in the 1970s, in reaction to the theory of transformational grammar which was current in the late 1970s. It mainly focuses on syntax, including its relation with morphology and semantics. There has been little LFG work on phonology.
In generative linguistics, Distributed Morphology is a theoretical framework introduced in 1993 by Morris Halle and Alec Marantz. The central claim of Distributed Morphology is that there is no divide between the construction of words and sentences. The syntax is the single generative engine that forms sound-meaning correspondences, both complex phrases and complex words. This approach challenges the traditional notion of the Lexicon as the unit where derived words are formed and idiosyncratic word-meaning correspondences are stored. In Distributed Morphology there is no unified Lexicon as in earlier generative treatments of word-formation. Rather, the functions that other theories ascribe to the Lexicon are distributed among other components of the grammar.
In syntactic analysis, a constituent is a word or a group of words that function as a single unit within a hierarchical structure. The constituent structure of sentences is identified using tests for constituents. These tests apply to a portion of a sentence, and the results provide evidence about the constituent structure of the sentence. Many constituents are phrases. A phrase is a sequence of one or more words built around a head lexical item and working as a unit within a sentence. A word sequence is shown to be a phrase/constituent if it exhibits one or more of the behaviors discussed below. The analysis of constituent structure is associated mainly with phrase structure grammars, although dependency grammars also allow sentence structure to be broken down into constituent parts.
In generative grammar, non-configurational languages are languages characterized by a flat phrase structure, which allows syntactically discontinuous expressions, and a relatively free word order.
In linguistics, nominalization or nominalisation is the use of a word that is not a noun as a noun, or as the head of a noun phrase. This change in functional category can occur through morphological transformation, but it does not always. Nominalization can refer, for instance, to the process of producing a noun from another part of speech by adding a derivational affix, but it can also refer to the complex noun that is formed as a result.
Biolinguistics can be defined as the study of biology and the evolution of language. It is highly interdisciplinary as it is related to various fields such as biology, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, mathematics, and neurolinguistics to explain the formation of language. It is important as it seeks to yield a framework by which we can understand the fundamentals of the faculty of language. This field was first introduced by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Arizona. It was first introduced in 1971, at an international meeting at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Biolinguistics, also called the biolinguistic enterprise or the biolinguistic approach, is believed to have its origins in Noam Chomsky's and Eric Lenneberg's work on language acquisition that began in the 1950s as a reaction to the then-dominant behaviorist paradigm. Fundamentally, biolinguistics challenges the view of human language acquisition as a behavior based on stimulus-response interactions and associations. Chomsky and Lenneberg militated against it by arguing for the innate knowledge of language. Chomsky in 1960s proposed the Language Acquisition Device (LAD) as a hypothetical tool for language acquisition that only humans are born with. Similarly, Lenneberg (1967) formulated the Critical Period Hypothesis, the main idea of which being that language acquisition is biologically constrained. These works were regarded as pioneers in the shaping of biolinguistic thought, in what was the beginning of a change in paradigm in the study of language.
In linguistics, an empty category, which may also be referred to as a covert category, is an element in the study of syntax that does not have any phonological content and is therefore unpronounced. Empty categories exist in contrast to overt categories which are pronounced. When representing empty categories in tree structures, linguists use a null symbol (∅) to depict the idea that there is a mental category at the level being represented, even if the word(s) are being left out of overt speech. The phenomenon was named and outlined by Noam Chomsky in his 1981 LGB framework, and serves to address apparent violations of locality of selection — there are different types of empty categories that each appear to account for locality violations in different environments. Empty categories are present in most of the world's languages, although different languages allow for different categories to be empty.
Rochelle Lieber is an American Professor of Linguistics at the University of New Hampshire. She is a linguist known for her work in morphology, the syntax-morphology interface, and morphology and lexical semantics.
Nanosyntax is an approach to syntax where the terminal nodes of syntactic parse trees may be reduced to units smaller than a morpheme. Each unit may stand as an irreducible element and not be required to form a further "subtree." Due to its reduction to the smallest terminal possible, the terminals are smaller than morphemes. Therefore, morphemes and words cannot be itemised as a single terminal, and instead are composed by several terminals. As a result, Nanosyntax can serve as a solution to phenomena that are inadequately explained by other theories of syntax.
Syntactic movement is the means by which some theories of syntax address discontinuities. Movement was first postulated by structuralist linguists who expressed it in terms of discontinuous constituents or displacement. Some constituents appear to have been displaced from the position in which they receive important features of interpretation. The concept of movement is controversial and is associated with so-called transformational or derivational theories of syntax. Representational theories, in contrast, reject the notion of movement and often instead address discontinuities with other mechanisms including graph reentrancies, feature passing, and type shifters.
Processability theory is a theory of second language acquisition developed by Manfred Pienemann. The theory has been used as a framework by scientists from Europe, North America, Asia and Australia.
Prosodic bootstrapping in linguistics refers to the hypothesis that learners of a primary language (L1) use prosodic features such as pitch, tempo, rhythm, amplitude, and other auditory aspects from the speech signal as a cue to identify other properties of grammar, such as syntactic structure. Acoustically signaled prosodic units in the stream of speech may provide critical perceptual cues by which infants initially discover syntactic phrases in their language. Although these features by themselves are not enough to help infants learn the entire syntax of their native language, they provide various cues about different grammatical properties of the language, such as identifying the ordering of heads and complements in the language using stress prominence, indicating the location of phrase boundaries, and word boundaries. It is argued that prosody of a language plays an initial role in the acquisition of the first language helping children to uncover the syntax of the language, mainly due to the fact that children are sensitive to prosodic cues at a very young age.
Lexicalist hypothesis is a hypothesis proposed by Noam Chomsky in which he claims that syntactic transformations only can operate on syntactic constituents. The hypothesis states that the system of grammar that assembles words is separate and different from the system of grammar that assembles phrases out of words.
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Dikken, Marcel Den (2002). "Lexical Integrity, Checking, and the Mirror: A Checking Approach to Syntactic Word Formation". Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics. 6 (2/3): 169–225. doi:10.1023/A:1023644921934. S2CID195305229.
Harris, Alice C. (2002). Endoclitics and the Origins of Udi Morphosyntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN0-19-924633-5.
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Henderson, John (2002). "The word in Eastern/Central Arrernte". In Dixon, R M W; Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y (eds.). Word. A Cross-linguistic Typology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp.100–124.
Hohenhaus, Peter (1998). "Non-Lexicalizability". Lexicology. 4 (2): 237–280.
Lieber, Rochelle (1992). Deconstructing Morphology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Spencer, Andrew (2005). "Word-Formation and Syntax". In Lieber, Rochelle; S̆tekauer, Pavol (eds.). Handbook of Word-Formation. Netherlands: Springer. pp.73–97. ISBN1402035969.
Sportiche, Dominique; Koopman, Hilda; Stabler, Edward (2014). An Introduction to Syntactic Analysis and Theory. Wiley Blackwell. ISBN9781405100175.
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