Against category-less roots in syntax and word learning: objections to Barner and Bale (2002)

This paper argues against analyzing grammatical category as a morphological epiphenomenon irrelevant for syntax. Using evidence from English and Greek it refutes the account in Barner and Bale [Lingua 112 (2002), 771], whereby coinages are derivations of the free syntactic insertion of roots in nominal and verbal environments, and presents evidence suggesting they are products of meta-linguistic processes. Rehearsing the discussion in Chomsky's Remarks on Nominalization [Readings in English Transformational Grammar (1970) 184], the paper goes on to show that seeking to syntactically derive nouns and verbs from roots stumbles upon the idiosyncratic differences many noun-verb pairs display between them. Towards this, it foregrounds the role of non-zero derivational morphology in Greek and Hungarian.