The indivisibility of words

Extract

Many contemporary linguists hold that an adequate description of a natural language must represent many of its vocabulary items as syntactically and/or semantically complex. A sentence containing the word kill, for instance, will on this view be assigned a ‘deep syntactic structure’ or ‘semantic representation’ in which kill is represented by a portion or portions of tree-structure, the lowest nodes of which are labelled with ‘semantic primitives’ such as CAUSE and DIE, or CAUSE, BECOME, NOT and ALIVE. In the case of words such as cats or walked, which are formed in accordance with productive rules of ‘inflexional’ rather than ‘derivational’ morphology, there is little dispute that their composite status will be reflected at most or all levels of linguistic representation. (That is why I refer, above, to ‘vocabulary items’: cat and cats may be called different ‘words’, but not different elements of the English vocbulary.) When morphologically simple words such as kill are treated as composite at a ‘deeper’ level, I, for one, find my credulity strained to breaking point. (The case of words formed in accordance with productive or non-productive rules of derivational morphology, such as killer or kingly, is an intermediate one and I shall briefly return to it below.)