Every account of the lexicon posits a division between two major classes of morphemes: lexical and functional. From a pre-theoretical perspective, lexical morphemes comprise roots, understood to encode ‘substance,’ while functional morphemes are understood to serve grammar-internal operations or logical relations as represented in grammar. Current minimalist approaches to the lexicon cast this division in terms of two elementary primitives made available to syntactic computation, respectively, roots and (bundles of) formal features. With the aim of reconstructing the body of theoretical work developed around these two sets of primitives over the last third years, this course explores the core properties of roots in contrast to those of formal features, as well as competing views regarding how these primitives should be represented to account for speakers’ lexical knowledge. The course also investigates the behavior of hybrid morphological units, i.e. units that appear to bear both lexical and functional properties, such as derivational morphemes and affixoids, in order to determine what they can reveal about current linguistic theorizing on such bipartite division of the lexicon, and whether amendments to theories of roots and features should be made to accommodate their properties. Generative approaches to grammar that adopt a non-lexicalist perspective, such as Distributed Morphology and the Exoskeletal Model, will provide the theoretical foundation for the course. Students will be introduced to the interplay of such primitives in the construction of syntactic objects and will develop the ability to navigate current literature on the syntax-morphology interface critically, enabling them to evaluate and manipulate these primitives and assess their impact on linguistic analyses.
- Docente: Vitor Augusto Nobrega