page_title: Lexical semantics
section_title: Halle & Marantz 1993
hierarchical_section_title: Lexical semantics / Syntactic basis of event structure: a brief history / Micro-syntactic theories: 1990s to the present / Halle & Marantz 1993
caption_attribution_description: Syntax tree for distributed morphology in lexical semantics
context_page_description: Lexical semantics, is a subfield of linguistic semantics. The units of analysis in lexical semantics are lexical units which include not only words but also sub-words or sub-units such as affixes and even compound words and phrases. Lexical units include the catalogue of words in a language, the lexicon. Lexical semantics looks at how the meaning of the lexical units correlates with the structure of the language or syntax. This is referred to as syntax-semantic interface.
  The study of lexical semantics looks at:
  the classification and decomposition of lexical items
  the differences and similarities in lexical semantic structure cross-linguistically
  the relationship of lexical meaning to sentence meaning and syntax.
  Lexical units, also referred to as syntactic atoms, can stand alone such as in the case of root words or parts of compound words or they necessarily attach to other units such as prefixes and suffixes do. The former are called free morphemes and the latter bound morphemes. They fall into a narrow range of meanings and can combine with each other to generate new denotations.
context_section_description: Morris Halle and Alec Marantz introduced the notion of distributed morphology in 1993. This theory views the syntactic structure of words as a result of morphology and semantics, instead of the morpho-semantic interface being predicted by the syntax. Essentially, the idea that under the Extended Projection Principle there is a local boundary under which a special meaning occurs. This meaning can only occur if a head-projecting morpheme is present within the local domain of the syntactic structure. The following is an example of the tree structure proposed by distributed morphology for the sentence "John's destroying the city". Destroy is the root, V-1 represents verbalization, and D represents nominalization.
caption: Halle & Marantz 1993 structure
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