Lexical Integrity: A mere construct or more a construction?
-
Bert Cappelle
Abstract
This paper reviews the so-called Lexical Integrity Principle, resting on the assumption that morphology and syntax are distinct components of grammar. In the forty-odd years since its original formulation, this principle has repeatedly come under fire. Phrasal compounds ([[Lexical Integrity]NP Principle]N being an example!) are often adduced as counterevidence, but I here argue that phrases generally don’t appear inside compounds and that the principle therefore cannot be so easily discarded. The claim that parts of words cannot be syntactically manipulated has remained relatively unchallenged, which is another reason to uphold some aspects of Lexical Integrity. The separability of particle verbs, though, presents a well-known potential problem. I address recent voices that particle verbs, despite neuroscientific evidence of their lexical status, are not words, maintaining they can be items with word status, given for example their occurrence in the [V the Ntaboo-word out of NP] construction. A constructionist approach to alternation phenomena offers a solution to the separability issue, which consists in having schematic particle verb constructions whose grammatical status (and not just word order) is underspecified. As words, particle verbs stay together; as phrases, their parts can separate. To salvage the Lexical (or, better, Morphological) Integrity of words, this paper proposes a principle –a construction of sorts – that is a generalization emerging from how we use words.
Acknowledgements
My work on earlier versions of this paper led to some stimulating exchange of ideas with Jared W. Desjardins, Guy Emerson, Thomas Hoffmann, Russell Lee-Goldman, Laura Michaelis, Friedemann Pulvermüller, Martin Schäfer, Peter Uhrig, Remi van Trijp and especially Beate Hampe, who I thank in particular for her insightful comments on the draft manuscript. All usual disclaimers apply.
Appendix
Types and tokens of complex(-looking) words in a single text of journalistic prose (‘How rotten is Russia’s army?’, The Economist, April 30th, 2022)
| Morphological category | Types (token numbers larger than 1) | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | seemingly morphologically complex words with bound morphemes (e.g. de-, -ion), staying together Note: apart from an inflectional ending, if any, most if not all of these can be considered monomorphemic from a synchronic perspective |
ambition, Baltic, collapse, decline, defeat/-ed (2), defence (3), deployed, deter, diseases, display, exports, exposed, formidable, forward, invaded/-ing (2), involve, mistake/-s (2), numerous, prevail, progress, prospect, rational, rebuke, reflecting, relief, remain, resist/-ed (2), resort, restored/-ing (2), stalemate, succeed, survive (32 types, 39 tokens) |
| 2 | derived words with a bound base and an affix, staying together with the base Note: this category is not always easy to distinguish from the previous one and the next one |
aggression (3), atrocities, chemical, decision, destruction, diplomatic, invasion (3), nuclear, reckless, terrible (10 types, 14 tokens) |
| 3 | derived words with at least one free base and a productive or non-productive affix, staying together Note: if there is more than one free base, one is inside another (e.g. in the case of unfortunately, fortune is inside fortunate, which is inside unfortunate, which is inside unfortunately) |
adaptable, ammunition, armed (3), armoured, aspirations, biological, briefing, brutal, brutality, central, chaotic, chiefly, civilians, comforting, commander/-s (2), conventional (2), corruption, dangerous (2), disaffected, economic, embodies, encroachment, equipment, escalation, eventually, failings, failure, fighting (2), flattening, global, government (2), greatness, humiliation (2), inadequacies, including, incompetence, indisputably, initiative, miscalculation, mostly, non-aligned, officer/-s (2), operations, opportunism, partly, population, probably, repeatedly (2), reputation (2), Russian/-s (12), standing, strategists, superpower, surely, talented, temptation, terrorising, threatened/-ing/-s (3), ultimately, unable, unfortunately, weakens, weakness/-es (2), Western, willing (65 types, 90 tokens) |
| 4 | compounds with free morphemes, staying together Note: even if a compound is part of another, it is mentioned separately |
air power, aircraft, battlefield, chock-full, decision-making, defence budget, flagship, headstrong, invasion plans, manpower, mass destruction, outward-looking, propaganda machine, purchasing power, setback, soft power, Soviet collapse, superpower (3), superpower status, tank turret, tripwire, tripwire defence, update, warfare, well armed, world-class particle verbs: sets out, fell back, drown out, drag on, used up, run out, set up (33 types, 35 tokens) |
| 5 | derived words with a phrasal component, staying together | nuclear-armed, medium-sized, Central African (3 types, 3 tokens) |
| 6 | compounds with a phrasal component, staying together | Black Sea fleet (1 type, 1 token) |
| 7 | phrase-like strings used as words, staying together | out-of-date, up-to-the-minute (2 types, 2 tokens) |
| 8 | morphologically complex words whose parts are separated by intervening words | (0 types, 0 tokens) |
Note: Words are shown with the inflectional forms they have in the text.
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Articles in the same Issue
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- Editorial: Cognitive Linguistics as an interdisciplinary endeavour
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- Death, enemies, and illness: How English and Russian metaphorically conceptualise boredom
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- Extending structural priming to test constructional relations: Some comments and suggestions
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- Cognitive Linguistics meets Interactional Linguistics: Language development in the arena of language use
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial: Cognitive Linguistics as an interdisciplinary endeavour
- How vector space models disambiguate adjectives: A perilous but valid enterprise
- Death, enemies, and illness: How English and Russian metaphorically conceptualise boredom
- The status of nominal sub-categories: Exploring frequency densities of plural -s
- No big deal: Situation-backgrounding uses of the Polish dative reflexive pronoun sobie/se
- Hand gestures with verbs of throwing: Collostructions, style and metaphor
- Exploring the conceptualisation of locative events in French, English, and Dutch: Insights from eye-tracking on two memorisation tasks
- Extending structural priming to test constructional relations: Some comments and suggestions
- Lexical Integrity: A mere construct or more a construction?
- Cognitive Linguistics meets Interactional Linguistics: Language development in the arena of language use
- Cognitive Linguistics meets multilingual language acquisition: What pattern identification can tell us
- Constructionist approaches to creativity
