On the morphological notion of head, conversion and structure of compounds

Abstract

In this paper the author discusses the notion of head in morphology, and in particular William's Righthand Rule and the objections formulated by Scalise (1988) and Olsen (1990a, 1990b). The analysis of Serbian examples shows the following: The inflection must be assumed to be a part of the head in the case of suffixed derivation or combined prefixal-sufixal derivation, while in the case of pure conversion it alone makes up the head of the word. Derivational suffixes together with following inflection also must belong to the head of the word. Prefixes may also do so if they change some syntactic features, e. g. aspect or transitivity in verbs. Together with suffixes or inflection prefixes may form circumfixes which then form a head of the word. Inflection always takes part in the head of the word because it transfers syntactically necessary features further to phrases and sentences. In English and German the role of inflection is not so obvious because of its paucity, but the author argues that in these languages inflection is supported in its category changing role by other grammatical features of the system. In particular, the circumfix formed by verbal prefixes and inflectional endings explains the cases of verb type enrich which have been a long-standing puzzle for many theories of word structure. The author argues that the words derived by circumfixes have binary word structure, not trinomial as assumed by Olsen (1990b). The author notices that inflection determining gender and category in Serbian is always attached directly to the stem, i. e. the neighboring morpheme to which inflection is attached must not be derived by suffixation because suffixes are subcategorized for a particular inflectional paradigm. The observation is formulated as a general rule (12). The discussion of Olsen (1990b) shows that this limitation on the category changing power of inflection is also observed in English and German. Many cases of backformation may be accounted for by this principle (e. g. ružiti v. ružan adj., dubiti v. dubok adj., sprega s. 'c spregnuti v. in Serbian, peddle peddler, edit editor in English and die Hame hamisch notland(en) Notlandung in German). The conversion of adjectives into nouns of the type Francuska, Nemačka is lexically limited to a particular sort of items and is only partial because the adjectival declination is preserved. The noted limitation does not hold for inflection because inflectional morphemes are not subcategorized for further suffixation. For this reason some inflected forms may undergo conversion (e. g. gerunds running, swiming in English, das Wollen, verdrgert in German, rascveta-lalilo adj. in Serbian). As in English and German, conversion in Serbian is also productive in converting nouns to verbs, and verbs to nouns. The conversion of adjectives to verbs is less productive now because the reserve of possible bases has already been exhausted. The lack of the conversion of nominal and verbal bases into adjectives is simply explained by the fact that adjectives do not have independent inflectional paradigm - a simple explanation which is not available for the theory which explains conversion by null suffixes. In Serbian, conversion may apply to compound bases, and the author argues that the type secikesa 'pickpocket' is derived from the verb phrase by conversion.

U članku autor analizira morfološki pojam glave reči i primenu toga pojma na objašnjenje derivacione konverzije u engleskom, nemačkom i srpskom jeziku. Posebno se razmatra domen te konverzije u srpskom jeziku i objašnjava ograničenje u pogledu moguće složenosti osnove. Primena pojma glave omogućava i tačniju klasifikaciju složenica.