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THE LINGUISTICS STUDENT’S HANDBOOK 154
Level-Order Hypothesis
Although the term is not introduced in her work, level ordering is introduced
by Siegel (1979 [1974]), who suggests that the behaviour of various
kinds of affix inEnglish can be accounted for if ‘the lexicon is so ordered
that Class I affixation precedes Class II affixation’ (Siegel 1979: 103). Class
II affixation involves the so-called ‘stress-neutral’ affixes, while Class I
affixation involves those affixes whose addition has the potential to influence
stress patterns. Crucially for the level-order hypothesis, the rules dealing
with stress are introduced between the rules introducing the two classes of
affix.
Lexicalist Hypothesis
Chomsky (1970: 190) introduces the lexicalist hypothesis as the proposition
that ‘a great many items appear in the lexicon with fixed selectional and strict
subcategorization features, but with a choice as to the features associated with
the lexical categories noun, verb, adjective.’ Elsewhere on the same page he
refers to such a lexical entry as a ‘neutral’ lexical entry, one which does not
determine in the lexicon whether we are dealing with, for example, destroy,
destruction or destructive.
More recently, the term ‘lexicalist hypothesis’ has been used of something
also called the ‘strong lexicalist hypothesis’ or the Lexical Integrity Principle,
namely that syntactic operations have no access to the internal structure of
words, so that the operation of syntactic processes cannot depend on the presence
of particular word-internal elements, and elements within a word cannot
be referred to by anaphoric processes.
Linguistic Relativity principle
See Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
Multiple Application Constraint
See Repeated Morph Constraint.
Natural Serialisation Principle
This principle is associated with Theo Vennemann (see Bartsch & Vennemann
1972), who suggested that the order of operand and operator is consistent in
any language. This is a generalisation of work on word-order typologies. The
principle is too strong in its bald form.