Morphology and Compositional Interpretation
Nathan Malik

Abstract:
Every definition of the Principle of Compositionality presupposes some set of atoms that provide the primary inputs to a compositional interpretation. When it comes to the study of the compositionality of natural language, such atoms are often equated with words. The diversity of word-structure, or morphology, attested cross-linguistically is vast and highly complex. This naturally leads to the question of how best to understand theoretically the relevance of morphological structure to a compositional semantics; namely, which parts of natural language are the most basically meaningful elements, the compositional atoms that may be stored in the lexicon and serve as the initial inputs to a process of interpretation? Any morphological theory which maintains that proper parts of morphologically complex words can be isolated and are individually meaningful is subject to a number of notable challenges, once it is related to broader grammatical issues involved in a compositional natural language semantics. The alternative position, which takes morphologically complex words in their entirety to be syntactically atomic and semantically basic, invites several questions of its own. Upon the adoption of a holistic conception of the lexicon, that systematically organises the forms and meanings of whole, internally complex words as nodes in a structured network of lexical and grammatical relations, those questions may begin to be addressed.