Adjective Incorporation and the Morphosyntactic Interface: a Postsyntactic Approach to Word Formation

The determination of the component of Universal Grammar where word formation takes place has been a major area of controversy in the literature. The main goal of this book is to uncover the component of Universal Grammar where a morphologically-complex de-adjectival verb is formed. It shows that although the internal structure of morphologically-complex de-adjectival causatives is empirically and theoretically predicted to be opaque to phrase-level operations (Borer 1991; Li 2005), syntactic processes and descriptions are not oblivious to the internal structure of that derived structure in Oromo and Amharic. Building on a well-motivated assumption that there is no well-formed syntactic structure into which a synthetic de-adjectival verb might project (Li 2005), we advance an argument to the effect that both members of those derived de- adjectival causatives are lexically independent. Inspired by work done in Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993), we maintain that a merger of the members of de-adjectival causatives takes place post-syntactically in an intermediate level of representation called morphological structure (MS).