LINGUIST List 17.3495
Sun Nov 26 2006
Diss: Linguistic Theories: Mukai: 'A Comparative Study of Compound ...'
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1. Makiko
Mukai,
A Comparative Study of Compound Words in English, Japanese and Mainland Scandinavian
Message 1: A Comparative Study of Compound Words in English, Japanese and Mainland Scandinavian
Date: 24-Nov-2006
From: Makiko Mukai <makiko.mukaincl.ac.uk>
Subject: A Comparative Study of Compound Words in English, Japanese and Mainland Scandinavian
Institution: Newcastle University
Program: Centre for Research in Linguistics
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2006
Author: Makiko Mukai
Dissertation Title: A Comparative Study of Compound Words in English, Japanese and Mainland Scandinavian
Linguistic Field(s):
Linguistic Theories
Dissertation Director:
Anders Holmberg
Dissertation Abstract:
The aim of this thesis is to propose a structure for compounds,specifically compound nouns in Japanese, English and Mainland Scandinavianwithin the framework of Chomsky's Minimalist Program and Bare PhraseStructure (Chomsky 1995). The purpose is to show that words are derived inNarrow Syntax as phrases and that words must have asymmetrical structure,i.e. a head of the word should be determined.
The proposed structure of a compound noun in the languages in question isas follows:
(1) [Root [Root + P(x)]]
Structure (1) is derived with the following assumptions in mind.
1. The place of Morphology within the Minimalist Program is argued to beoutside the Lexicon and after the Narrow Syntax. This has led severallinguists to argue that a word is derived in the same way as a phrase.Moreover, linear order is redundant in the Narrow Syntax, since thestructure determines the word order. As a result, it is not the Right-handHead Rule proposed by Williams (1981) which determines the head of acompound word but the structure does. The Right-hand Head Rule may have aplace in the phonology, though, in stipulating how a word derived in theNarrow Syntax is spelled out. The rule is formulated by Williams to applyin Morphology. In most current minimalist theories morphology is afterspell-out. But the head must be determined before spell-out, since itdetermines the LF as well as determining aspects of the PF.
2. Nothing prevents us applying Merge at the level of the word as well asthe phrasal level. As Williams' (1981) Right-hand Head Rule cannot be usedwithin the Minimalist Program, Collins' (2002) definition of head is usedfor compound words. According to Collins, a head is a category which hasone or more unsaturated features. Another stipulation taken from Collins(2202) is that when a lexical item is chosen from the lexical array andintroduced to the derivation, the unsaturated features of this lexical itemmust be satisfied before any new unsaturated lexical items are chosen fromthe lexical array. The effect of these two assumptions is that when twocategories a and b are merged, only one of them, say a, can have anunsaturated feature (which is not saturated by a), so a will be the head.
The structure (1) shows the following.
•First, a root without word class features is merged with a Propertyfeature, the content of which is given by the root.
•The Property feature is represented above as P(roperty) (x) where 'x'represents the unvalued referential index.
•There are two ways to check P(x): one is assigning x a value, that is anindex, and the other is deleting x. Since the P(x) feature is unsaturatedin the sense that it needs a referential index from either D or DP, it is ahead, and as such it percolates to the dominating node. Then, another rootis merged to form a compound word. As P(x) is the only unsaturated featurebefore and/or after the root is merged, it is percolated and it is the headof the whole compound.
The present theory can account for the syntactic and semantic properties ofa wide range of compounds, particularly noun-noun compounds in English,Japanese, and Mainland Scandinavian, within a syntactic theory based onminimalist assumptions.
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