Interface between Morphology and Syntax: A Constraint-Based and Lexicalist Approach

  • Published : 1998.06.01

Abstract

conflicting criterial used in identifying words have called the lexical integrity principle into question. That is, cases where the morphological word does not coincide with the syntactic word have notivated the syntactic view of word derivation, as pointed out by Bresnan and Mchombo(1995). Further, the implicit desire to make the clausal structure of Korean parallel to those posited for English(Chomsky 1991) and French(Pollock 1989) has also led most of the current literature on Korean morphology to claim that Korean verbal inflections head their own functional projections such as AgrP, TP, and MP im syntax. In this paper, I will first argue against such a syntactic view. After reviewing some basic properties of Korean verbal inflections, I will show that the evidence from mismatch phenomena supports the lexical integrity principle over the head-movement theories of word derivation. Then, I will propose a theory of lexical grammar which maintains the lexical integrity principle while retaining the effects of functional projections and syntactic movement.

Keywords