Who Cares about Syntactic Category Information? a New Look at the Morphology-syntax Distinction and the Role of Semantics in Word-formation

In standard generative approaches, word-formation rules contain, among other things, information on the semantics of the suffix and the syntactic category (or word class) of possible bases. Based on the general assumption that word-class specification of the input is a crucial ingredient of derivational morphology, far-reaching claims have been made. For example, the Unitary Base Hypothesis (Aronoff 1976) states that word-formation rules can take only bases as input that share syntactic category information. This generative position is a reflection of the well-established traditional descriptive practice of talking about affixes as being, for example, ‘deverbal’, ‘deadjectival’ or ‘denominal’. In sum, across the different theoretical camps, the syntactic category of the base is, implicitly or explicitly, assumed to be central to any account of affixal behavior. In this paper I will challenge this view and make the rather bold claim that derivational morphology does not necessarily make reference to syntactic category information in the input. In fact, it will be shown that the word class specification of the input of word-formation rules creates numerous empirical and theoretical problems that have been largely ignored in the literature. I will therefore argue for an alternative hypothesis: with any given productive affix, the syntactic category of potential base words is only a by-product of the semantics of the process. This hypothesis has been put forward earlier (for example by Plank 1981, Plag 1998, 1999, Montermini 2001, Ryder 1999) but has never been investigated in more detail across larger sets of affixes. This will be done in the present paper using large amounts of English data from the OED (neologisms) and the BNC (hapax legomena). It will be shown that the Unitary Base Hypothesis is untenable in view of both the massive counter-evidence in the data and the theoretical problems involved in establishing an adequate system of category features. Furthermore, the inclusion of syntactic category information in the word-formation rules under investigation makes wrong predictions for significant portions of the data and fails to account for the phonological and semantic patterns observable in these morphological categories. In contrast, a semantic, output-oriented approach is much more successful in coping with these problems. The radical position put forward in this paper has serious implications for morphological theory. Any theory of syntax I am aware of makes use of word class information to specify the input of syntactic rules. If there are morphological rules that do not make reference to syntactic category in specifying their input, we are forced to acknowledge a vital difference between (derivational) morphology and syntax. Thus, the present paper provides a new kind of argument against the view that morphology is the syntax of words, advocated e.g. in Lieber (1992) or Distributed Morphology.