Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 December 2008
Bound neuter i-stems in Modern Icelandic, which occur as heads of compounds in for example salanguryroi ‘slang word’, support an overgenerating model of the lexicon. Bound stems are shown to be generated as constituents at level 1 of the lexicon and combined to form compounds at level 2. Bound stems are blocked from becoming inputs to the syntax by the Avoid Synonymy principle (Kiparsky 1983), revised as a constraint on the output of the lexicon as a whole. Because Avoid Synonymy operates in lexical Logical Form, it has access to word-internal structure at each lexical level. The revised version of Avoid Synonymy is given additional support from Icelandic and English.