Variation and creativity with radically afeatural Roots
In this presentation I give arguments for the radically afeatural Root hypothesis (Harley 2014),
among them that it provides a coherent model for variation in the meanings of words and idioms,
as well as for humorous word coinage. The approach is situated in Minimalist (Chomsky 2013)
Distributed Morphology (Embick 2015), adopting a strict Y-model. There is no generative
“lexicon” before syntax – “words”, like all hierarchical structure, are first of all the result of
Merge (and other hypothesized operations). Roots lack categorial, phonological, or semantic
features in the pre-syntactic Formative list, and are distinguished only by a unique (numerical?)
index that links them to corresponding entries in the PF Vocabulary and LF Encyclopedia lists.
There is plentiful evidence that the listed pronunciation or interpretation of Root
morphemes depends on their local morphosyntactic context. On the PF side, grammatically
conditioned suppletion is observed with Roots (1a-b); note that default Root exponents may
reappear in a different morphosyntactic context (1c). Therefore, storing irregular, syntacticcontext
dependent exponents in a pre-syntactic lexicon unnecessarily recapitulates syntax.
(1) a. go – went/*goed = [√231]  /wen/ / [[ __ v] T[+past]]
b. steal – thief/*stealer = [√348]  /thief/ / [[__ v] n-er]
c. thunder stealer/*thief = [√348]  /steal/ / [__ v]
In parallel at LF, the truth-conditional interpretation of Roots depends on their morphosyntactic
context, as listed in the Encyclopedia. This is evidenced by ‘cranberry’ morphemes (2a); indeed,
as Harley (2014) observes, such morphemes need not be bound, appearing in compounds (2b)
and coordinate phrases (2c).
(2) a. reckless – *reck/*reckful = [√497]  ‘caution’ / [__ adj-less]
b. chit-chat – *chit = [√559]  ‘trivial’ / [[__][√CHAT]]
c. kit and caboodle – *caboodle = [√238]  ‘collection’ / [[√KIT][ Co0
[__]]]
In phrasal (3a,c) and compound (3b,d) idioms, Roots have special listed interpretations in a
morphosyntactically local context (Marantz 1997). In some idioms, both Roots receive a special
interpretation in each other’s context (3a-b); in others, only one Root does (3c-d).
(3) a. kick (‘lose’) the bucket (‘life’) b. wall (‘shy’) flower (‘person’)
c. take (‘climb’) the stairs (‘stairs’) d. bucket (‘life’) list (‘list’)
However, not everything traditionally called an idiom is technically an idiom in the sense of
contextually interpreted Roots. For example, expressions such as pushing up daisies or taking a
dirt nap do not require special interpretations of any Roots. At LF all the Roots are interpreted
‘literally’, i.e. by default, and the understood meaning of ‘dead’ is obtained via pragmatics.
Because numerous examples similar to (1-3) can be adduced in English and crosslinguistically,
we are empirically forced to admit at last some kind of mechanism for contextdependent
allomorphy and allosemy of Roots (here, it is late insertion of listed Vocabulary and
Encyclopedia entries). Pre-syntactic lexical storage of PF, LF, and categorial features of Roots
thus constitutes an additional, unforced mechanism, which by parsimony should be eliminated in
favor of late insertion for all Roots (Marantz 1996) according to the Subset Principle (Halle
1997). The quantitative question of why many (or most?) Roots do not seem to have special
context-dependent pronunciations or interpretations can plausibly be attributed to more general
principles of acquisition (e.g., Yang 2016).
Accepting the radically afeatural Root hypothesis furthermore allows an appealing
analysis of linguistic variation and creativity, in contrast to a pre-syntactic lexical black box. The
proposal explains how native speakers can be “wrong” about the meanings of words and idioms
(e.g., Pinker 2014). For example, disinterested can mean ‘not invested’ if an individual has listed
in her Encyclopedia a special interpretation for √INTEREST in the context of dis-; if not, the Root
will have the default interpretation, yielding ‘not interested’. For beg the question, both √BEG and
√QUESTION can have a special contextual interpretation listed in their respective Encyclopedia
entries (‘assume the conclusion’, like kick the bucket), or √BEG can have a special interpretation
while √QUESTION gets the default (‘raise the question’, like take the stairs). Of course, an
individual can always update her Encyclopedia, and moreover she can freely merge Roots with
grammatical terminals in novel ways, thereby coining new words or idioms. This can be
humorous when a recognizable Root is unexpectedly not listed with the new syntactic context.
For example, on “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” characters backform a verb from cathartic (e.g., “You
catharted hard!”, i.e., [√CATHAR v]) and prohibit “any chits and/or chats” (i.e., [√CHIT n]). Humor
can also be generated by taking the default Root interpretation or exponent when a special one is
available; for example, a cartoon shows a man running from a building carrying a small flight of
stairs with the caption In case of fire, take stairs, and the website Funny or Die has a feature
called Goodest Tweets This Week. Thus, novel or comedic “word” meanings, like syntactic
creativity generally, are possible because afeatural Roots are interpreted and exponed in the
context of hierarchal structures created by Merge (Berwick & Chomsky 2016).
Selected References
Berwick, Robert C. & Chomsky, Noam 2016. Why Only Us: Language and Evolution,
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam 2013. 'Problems of Projection', Lingua, 130 (2013): 33-49.
Embick, David 2015. The Morpheme: A Theoretical Introduction, Boston/Berlin: De Gruyter
Mouton.
Halle, Morris 1997. 'Distributed Morphology: Impoverishment and Fission', MIT Working Papers
in Linguistics.
Harley, Heidi 2014. 'On the identity of roots', Theoretical Linguistics, 40 (3/4): 225-76.
Marantz, Alec 1996. '“Cat” as a phrasal idiom: Consequences of late insertion in Distributed
Morphology', MIT.
Marantz, Alec 1997. 'No escape from syntax: Don't try morphological analysis in the privacy of
your own lexicon', In Proceedings of the 21st Penn Linguistics Colloquium, eds. A.
Dimitriadis, L. Siegel, C. Surek-Clark and A. Williams, Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics.
Pinker, Steven 2014. The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st
Century, New York, NY: Penguin.
Yang, Charles 2016. The Price of Linguistic Productivity: How children learn and break rules of
language, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.