- The head of a phrase is an open-class category which determines the category of the phrase; for instance,
NPs are headed by nouns, APs by adjectives. By contrast, the category of a morphological structure is
determined by its affixes; for instance, -ationforms nouns from verbs,im- forms adjectives from adjectives,
and -ityforms nouns from adjectives and verbs. - When a word bears multiple inflections, these come in afixed“templatic” order, often with no hint of
hierarchical stacking; by contrast, syntax is full of alternative word orders and hierarchical structure. - Inflection normally marks only relations internal to a single clause; by contrast, phrasal syntax is replete with
long-distance dependencies, where a phrase appears in a clause outside its“normal”position. - Inflection lends itself to a great deal of idiosyncratic irregularity; syntax much less so.
- Most of the structure interior to words is“invisible”to rules of phrasal syntax (the Lexicalist Hypothesis of
Chomsky(1972a) and theLexicalIntegrityPrincipleofBresnanand Mchombo(1995). Theonlypart ofword
structure that interacts with phrasal syntax is inflectional morphology (e.g. tense, case, number, gender)
(Anderson 1992). - As stressed by Talmy (1978), among others, the semantic range of the closed-class items (including not just
affixes but also grammatically specialized items such as auxiliary verbs and pronouns) is quite limited:
prominentamongthemareexpressions oftenseand aspect,causativity, valence(e.g. active/passive),mood(e.
g. indicative/subjunctive), negation, person, number (singular/plural), reflexivity, gender, social relation of
interlocutors (intimate/formal), relative magnitude (comparative, superlative) and speaker's evidence for
making a claim (e.g. direct experience vs. hearsay). There are no expressions of absolute category, size, color,
rate, manner, location, number (above two), and so forth, which are characteristic of the open-class items.
These differences suggest that phrasal syntax and morphosyntax might be regarded as semi-autonomous tiers with
related but not identical organizing principles. Alternatively, they might be treated as different scales of phrasal syntax
with different behavior, much as different scales of phonology such as phonological words and intonational phrases
have somewhat different principles. Working out even a sketch of these alternatives is, however, beyond the scope of
the present work.
Returning to the main point of this section, the architectures illustrated in Fig. 5.5, as well as the architectures of
autosegmentaland metricalphonology, are ofinterestherebecause theyexplicitlyabandonChomsky's assumptionthat
there is a single source of generativity in grammar. What is new in the present