Compounds, composability, and morphological idiosyncrasy

Abstract Working within the framework of Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993, 1994), this paper offers a derivational analysis of the range of structures and the types of idiosyncrasy associated with compounding. Building on prior analysis by Harley (2009), compound structures are argued to vary according to the ways in which the head and the non-head of a compound are categorised. Specifically, if the non-head of a compound is acategorial, then the relationship between the compound head and non-head is non-decomposable. Based on data from Hebrew (Borer 2009), it is shown that this also makes the non-head inaccessible to independent syntactic-semantic operations, including coordination, and coreference with a pronoun. It is additionally shown that morphologically-conditioned allomorphy (Bobaljik 2012) may be conditioned between the compound head and a suffix, as constitutes part of a bracketing paradox (Williams 1981). Where categorisation of the head of the compound gives rise to effects of headedness, however, this allomorphy may be ‘blocked’ by the structure associated with exocentricity. The final sections of the paper consider exocentricity, and other interactions between idiosyncratic meanings and phonology, in further detail.