Lexical structure and derivational morphology
Chomsky 1970 presents a case for handling derivational morphology in the lexicon rather than in the transformational component. The analysis concerns only derived nominals and their relation to verbs. Yet it is possible to extend the analysis to cover all predicates—in particular, passive ones.
In English, morphological processes are extremely productive, as shown by the following small sample:
(1)
No doubt this list could be greatly expanded if we began to consider agent nominals like murderer, the ing-class of adjectives like amusing, and other derived forms.
In order to handle these morphological relationships in the lexicon, certain machinery must be built into it. Thus the general form for the lexical entries of related forms would be:
(2)
All morphologically related forms would be listed in the same entry The semantic representation indicates the semantic class of the item as well as the conceptual material shared by individual items. As an illustration, consider that the difference between the pairs give/loan (V), given /loaned (A), and gift /loan (N) is in each case the difference between the transferring of a physical object from one party to another, but only in the case of loan is the return of the object implied. This difference is independent of the syntactic form of these pairs. Listing each syntactic form separately in the lexicon is uneconomical, and fails to capture the fact that related lexical items of different syntactic categories may contain the same semantic material.
In addition to 2, the lexicon includes two kinds of rules (followingJackendoff 1969) to account for the syntactic and semantic properties of related forms. Aside from strict subcategorization features, the syntactic features include morphological rules which specify the root and affix of the derived form and its syntactic category. For example, the lexicon would include a morphological rule for deriving gerundive nominals:
(3)
Semantic derivation rules specify the range of interpretation of the derived form. Thus the semantic derivation rule corresponding to Mgn appears as:
(4)
Such rules would be part of the semantic interpretation of a particular item.
As an example, consider the lexical entry for the items give (V), given (A), and gift (N):
(5)
This entry shows that these items share the entailment of motion and the conceptual structure which refers to moving a physical object to a particular location. They all govern the same semantic functions. They differ only in syntactic function and range of interpretation, as the semantic derivation rule Snom shows. According to the lexical entry the verb and the adjective have the same semantic representation and therefore the same range of interpretation, because no semantic derivation rule is associated with either form. In short, their semantic interpretation is non-distinct from that of the lexical entry itself. They differ in that the adjective entails the morphological rule “Ma: @+ed is analysed as an A’, whereas the verb entails none. The phonological representation of the noun gift is suppletive and must therefore be listed. Specifying the semantic functions governed by these items is superfluous, since this is already accounted for by designating the entry as MOTIONAL.
