Minimal words in a minimal syntax : word formation in Swedish
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Minimal words in a minimal syntax : word formation in Swedish
（Linguistik aktuell, v. 19）
J. Benjamin, c1998
- : eur
- : us
Available at 25 libraries
Note
Based on the author's Ph.D. thesis on the principles of word formation in swedish
Bibliography: p. [189]-195
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In Minimal Words in a Minimal Syntax the author combines a detailed description of the morphological structure of words in Swedish with a daring new approach to theoretical morphology, based on the Minimalist Program of Chomsky (1995) (as developed for syntactic structure). The X-bar theoretic approach to word structure of the Principles and Parameters framework is replaced by a rule free approach incorporating only Merge and Move as structure building devices. The author argues that stems have no word class features, which are provided inflectional affixes (including theme vowels etc.). Inflectional and derivational affixes differ only in the external syntactic requirement that inflectional affixes are associated with features that require checking in the functional domain. An important analysis of compounding is included, where binding elements are analyzed as a result of structural antisymmetry requirements a la Kayne (1994). Old chestnuts of morphological theory, such as the notion "head of a word" and the nature and structure of the lexicon, are succinctly discussed in the light of the theoretical proposals advanced here. On the empirical side, there are two lengthy chapters involving the semantic characterization of prefixes and suffixes in Swedish, explaining their distribution in terms of "types of Aktionsarten" imposed by the affix on its host.
Table of Contents
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Background Theories
- 3. A sketch of the principal ideas
- 4. Compounds
- 5. Derivation by means of suffixation
- 6. Derivation by means of prefixation
- 7. Past particles
- 8. Head of a word
- 9. The universality of word formation principles
- 10. Some notes on the lexicon
- 11. Summary
- 12. References
- 13. Index
by "Nielsen BookData"