Complex words as constructions : analysability, semantic transparency, and morphological productivity

Multi-morphemic or morphologically complex words are most simply defined as lexical items composed of more than one morpheme. However, this simplicity is deceptive because, in order for this definition to work, one must endorse the notion of morphemes as independent meaningful units. This is problematic in many respects, one being that in terms of both motivation and production, complex words under this account can only be represented in either decomposed or holistic fashions. The construction morphology framework, which treats complex words as constructions on the word level, allows for more fine-grained distinctions between the possible routes of word recognition due to its ability to identify fixed elements and slots (variables) in lexical structure. Historically, this word-based morphology has been slow to develop, which has had important ramifications in both the empirical and theoretical domains. On the empirical side, the repertoire of languages and expressions that have appeared on the radar of constructional grammatical work remains meagre. From a theoretical point of view, several influential ideas inspired by the dual-route theory and pertaining to the problems of morphological analysability and productivity persist to the present day and, strangely, coexist with modern connectionist approaches. The above considerations shape the motivation behind this thesis and its main research goals. From an empirical perspective, I aim to broaden the repertoire of languages for which complex words have been studied within the framework of construction morphology. From a theoretical perspective, I suggest a substantial rethinking of some still-popular approaches to the problems of the parsability and productivity of linguistic expressions. Specifically, I strive to leave behind what has been inherited in these domains from the dual-route theory of word recognition and to find a firm construction-morphology footing for the analysis of these phenomena.