Prefixation in English and Catalan - Departament de Filologia ...

1 INTRODUCTION 1
The present study deals with the derivation of words and the consequences that word
formation processes have on the argument structure of the base. A current topic in
generative grammar is whether word-structure is built by the laws of the syntax (cf.
Baker (1988), Marantz (1997, 2001), Hale & Keyser (henceforth HK) (1993, 1998,
2002), Mateu (2001a, 2001b, 2002, 2005), among others) or by the laws of the
morphological component (cf. Williams (1981a, 1981b), Selkirk (1982), Di Sciullo &
Williams (1987), Di Sciullo (1997), Kiparsky (1997), Varela & Haouet (2001),
Williams (2004), Lieber (2004), among others), partly reflecting the earlier debate
between lexicalist and transformationalist derivations (cf. Chomsky (1970), Halle
(1973), Aronoff (1976) vs. Lees (1970) (cited in Scalise (1984)), Lakoff (1970)). Here I
will adopt a modular theory of grammar that brings together the two different views. I
will assume that morphology constitutes a component on its own that interacts with the
other components of grammar, i.e. syntax, semantics and phonology (cf. Jackendoff
(1997), Ackema & Neeleman (2004)) and that there is some regularity behind the
lexical items in any language, a belief that goes back to Gruber (1965), Chomsky
(1970), Halle (1973), Jackendoff (1975), among the earliest references.
Headedness in morphology is regular. For instance, affixation processes in
English (e.g. Williams (1981a)) and Catalan (e.g. Mascaró (1986)) are typically rightheaded.
Since these will be the languages under analysis, Williams’ (1981a) Righthand
Head Rule (RHR) becomes relevant. The RHR 2 states that the head of a
morphologically complex word is rightmost. The head will assign its category to the
entire word by means of a mechanism referred to as percolation (see section 2.3 for
discussion of such a mechanism). A direct result of the RHR is that suffixes are
expected to determine the category of the word they are part of, since the head
determines the properties of the whole. In contrast, prefixes are not expected to change
the category of the words they attach to. The following examples show that suffixes (1a-
1 This thesis is a development of a publication (Padrosa (2005)) and an elaboration on a talk given at the
2005 BIDE Student Conference in Linguistics, in Bilbao (Spain).
2 Selkirk (1982) points out that the RHR is not universal and notes (citing from Lieber (1980)) that leftheaded
types predominate in Vietnamese, for example. The RHR must therefore be stated as part of the
grammar of Catalan and English, a parameter set for those languages with right-headed morphology.
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