Bracketing Paradox and Direct Compositionality: Montagovian Morphology for Bound Morphemes

In Bracketing Paradox and Direct Compositionality: Montagovian Morphology for Bound Morphemes, Kazuhiko Fukushima resolves bracketing paradoxes in Japanese--morphological vs. semantic incongruity, which supposedly pose insurmountable obstacles to traditional and simple-minded morphology--within morphology (the lexicon) proper. This resolution is achieved through formal semantic apparatus developed by Richard Montague and his followers, hence the label Montagovian Morphology. More generally and theoretically, this book addresses the issue of the optimal interface between morphology, which deals with minimal units of meaning and their combination within a word, and semantics, which handles increasingly larger units of meaning in the sentence. Fukushima argues that the nature of the interface is directly compositional, requiring no complex syntactic supposition or manipulation other than putting words together as is. The author concludes that a semantically reinforced morphological--that is, lexical--approach is superior to a syntactic one for characterizing the mapping between morphological and semantic domains, and that syntax per se cannot supersede morphology.

About the Author :
Kazuhiko Fukushima is professor of linguistics at Kansai Gaidai University.

Review :
"A core tenet of lexicalism is that the properties of words are determined in morphology by different principles than those which determine syntax, yet both morphology and syntax feed into semantics. Kazuhiko Fukushima develops an approach dubbed 'Montagovian Morphology' - a lexicalist and compositional approach to word-formation inspired by Montague grammar. Using rich semantic representations to represent word meanings, he analyzes complex word forms in Japanese involving adverbial modification, negation, and inflectional and derivational morphology, and argues that the lexicalist approach provides a superior account to decompositional syntactic analyses, on the basis of both empirical coverage and theoretical motivation." --Peter Sells, University of York "This book is a major semantic study of some complex morphological constructions in Japanese. The author proposes direct compositional semantic analyses for a number of Japanese constructions in which the desired semantic compositional structure does not appear to match the surface morpho-syntactic structure. Specifically, the book deals with 'size morphemes' such as ko-, the past tense -ta, the negation -nai, etc. An important alternative to analyses based on LF structures derived through syntactic movements." --Toshiyuki Ogihara, University of Washington