Grasping
Rules of Word-structure
The question of word
structure can be divided into two subparts, that of word-formation, the coining
of new words and that of word-analysis, the provision of structure to already
existing words. There is a lexicon or dictionary, the main provision for entry
into which is that an entry must be a word, and be arbitrary (unpredictable) in
at least one aspect of its meaning or form. New words are coined by the
application of general rules called Word Formation Rules. Such a rule forms a
new word from an already existing one, one in the lexicon, by performing an
operation of a specific sort on that existing word. Existing words are analyzed
by applying to them the same Word Formation Rules, but as redundancy rules,
i.e. as rules for determining how a word might have been formed. Not all new
words are added to the lexicon. Whether a given word is added depends on
whether it is arbitrary, and this is correlated with the productivity of a rule
by which it is formed.
Because of the way in
which Word Formation Rules are formulated (one affix, one rule), it is
necessary to posit a class of readjustment rules, which operate on the output
of the Word Formation Rules, and whose output itself is the input to the
phonology, and to the Lexical Insertion Transformation.
The rules of derivational
morphology are completely separated from the other sets of rules of a grammar.
They operate on words to produce words or to provide structure to existing
words.