Compositionality, of, word-formation

One of the criteria generally applied in distinguishing lexical processes from syntactic ones is compositionality: the standard assumption is that syntactic processes have transparent (compositional) semantics while word-formation is semantically opaque. In this paper I will argue that this assumption is false: certain processes which are generally held to be syntactic are compositional only to a limited extent, and to the same limited extent most lexical processes are also compositional. In Section 1. I will develop a formal definition of compositionality which enables us to treat ‘noncompositional’ phenomena on a par with the strictly compositional cases. Section 2. is a discussion of the semantics of English constructions involving two nouns (or noun-projections) connected by of. Such constructions offer a surprisingly wide range of data which is problematic for strictly compositional theories of grammar. In Section 3. I will sketch a solution that violates compositionality minimally.