Syntactic Affixation and Performance Structures

Functional elements (determiners, complementizers, modals, degree words) are in many ways the syntactic analogues of affixes in morphology. Typically, functional elements are bound elements. Phonologically, they are clitics: syntactically, they are unable to appear without an associated thematic element (noun, verb, adjective). I would like to extend the analogy by showing that functional elements also combine with their associated thematic elements to form wordlike units I call chunks. For example, the segment of a noun phrase from the determiner to the head noun is a chunk. The ongoing destruction of documents, for instance, consists of two chunks, the ongoing destruction and of documents. Chunks resemble words on several counts. Like the morphemes that form words, the words that form chunks are relatively tightly bound together. They generally cannot be moved out of their chunk, and the order in which they occur within the chunk is fixed. For example, the determiners, quantifiers, numerals, adjectives, etc. that constitute a noun chunk cannot be extracted, and are subject to elaborate and fairly rigid ordering constraints. Further, in the same way that inflected forms cannot be embedded within words (e.g. *dogscatcher), chunks containing functional elements cannot be embedded within other chunks. I discuss this constraint in detail in later sections. It accounts for a wide range of data, including the prohibition against complements in prenominal AP’s. *A proud of his son man is ill-formed because the chunk of his son is embedded in the chunk a proud man. Chunks are not constituents of S-structure. The ongoing destruction, for instance, is not a constiuent of the ongoing destruction of documents. Rather, chunks constitute a level of representation that mediates between S-structure and a number of aspects of performance, such as intonation. In the next section, I would like to discuss the role of chunks in linguistic performance. Subsequently, I turn to evidence that chunks are not only elements of a performance representation, but genuine syntactic elements, as well.