Basic Principles

In order to develop answers to the questions catalogued in the previous section, we need a base of central truths to draw upon during our investigations that will serve as anchors and a point of departure for the argumentation. Over the history of linguistics few principles have become so axiomatic as to provide such a base; however, the first two principles below seem to me to be axiomatic. They are followed by three theoretical principles of modern linguistics and cognitive science which seem firmly established even though troubled by lingering questions of detail.

I. The uncontroversial prototypical major class lexical items (nouns, verbs, and adjectives) consist of nonnull, mutually implied (directly articulated) phonological, grammatical, and semantic representations.

This principle is a specification of the Stoic (and subsequently Saussurian) definition of the classical linguistic sign. Throughout this book, noun, verb, and adjective stems will be referred to as “prototypical major lexical class items”. “Prototype” is used in this context to distinguish these uncontroversial lexical items from other potential types of lexical items, which some morphologists argue must belong to an independent morphological component. That Principle I holds for these three classes of lexical items has been assumed for centuries and is, to my knowledge, uncontroversial. The exact status of adverbs, however, is controversial. Manner adverbs seem to derive rather freely from qualitative adjectives while spatio-temporal adverbs do not seem to do so. It is widely recognized that items referred to as adverbs in the past in fact are several marginally connected classes. This category will be examined in what follows and most of the items composing it will be included under Principle I. All types of bound and free grammatical morphemes are considered controversial and are included among the data investigated here. The central issue of chapter 2 will be whether grammatical morphemes are covered by this principle. Whether the phonological representation may be null is an issue which still emerges from time to time, so it will also be examined in chapter 2.

II. Prototypical major class lexical items constitute synchronically open classes.

The lexical stock of the prototypical major lexical classes may be expanded synchronically by lexical derivation and a wide variety of logical, nongrammatical means described as lexical stock expansion by Beard: borrowing, loan translation, onomatopoeia, blending, backformation, clipping, acronymization, and the like. Whether the lexicon also contains some closed classes is an issue at stake in the remainder of this book. The point of Principle II is that the closed status of classes like prepositions and auxiliaries may not be ignored, which brings into question their assignment to the lexicon. In order to mix the two types of classes, one must first prove that nothing of significance motivates the distinction, that is, the differences between grammatical relations and semantic classes.

III. Prototypical major class items belong to one and only one lexical class (category).

Principle III means that each uncontroversial major class item belongs to a single, discrete lexical class. A major class item may be a noun, verb, or adjective but not both a noun and verb. Items like love, therefore, which have both a verbal and a nominal sense, are either accidental homonyms, or one is a principled derivate of the other. The assumption here is that the lexical categories are distinct and mutually exclusive, overlapping nowhere, but that they are related to each other by rules whose nature is an empirical question. Notice that this principle does not speak to the issue of squishes, that is, mixed categories. The category to which a major class item belongs may in fact be a mixed category, which derives its properties from two other, pure categories. However, if a major item belongs to a mixed or pure category, it belongs to that one category alone unless it is shifted to another by derivation. The reason that this principle is desirable, aside from the rigor it imparts to the model, is that it motivates derivation rules. Without Principle III there is no explanation of why languages have derivation rules, especially transposition […] whose unique purpose is to convert members of one class to another.

IV. The operations of an autonomous module have no access to operations internal to any other module.

This is the principle of modularity as presented by Chomsky and Fodor. If we assume that objects and operations of various grammatical subcomponents are distinct, we assume that they interact in only one way: the output of one set may be the input of another set. The operations of one distinct module or component cannot interact in any way with those of another. Hence, if the evidence shows the conditions on morphological rules to be compatible with those of syntax, the two grammatical components cannot be independent. However, if the conditions on their operations are incompatible, we must conclude that the two constitute discrete components, either one of which may operate only on the input or output of the other.

An important implication of Principle IV is that the outputs of various modules will reflect the nature of that module. In terms of the lexicon and syntax, this means that should the lexicon and syntax contain similar categories or operations, lexical output will nonetheless differ from syntactic output over the same categories and operations. Moreover, the differences will reflect the different natures of the modules involved: lexical output will always be words, while syntactic output will always be phrases, whatever similarities the two modules might otherwise share.

V. The parameters of morphology are universal.

This is the principle of Universal Grammar (UG), revised by Chomsky to make clear the claim that the components of grammars of various languages are not necessarily identical but simply share a universal set of parameters. These parameters exhibit a limited range of settings which may vary from language to language. Assuming this claim as axiomatic commits the remainder of this book to a search for a set of categories and operations available to all languages. The possibility that the grammatical categories of English represent a different set of parameters from those of, say, Mohawk, will not be entertained, even though it is an equally reasonable a priori assumption. Principle V is thus little more than a stipulation at this point, an attempt to restrict the enormous range of theoretical possibilities to an addressable set.