Paradigmatic Structures and Word Formation

Abstract

In this paper I will propose an organization of the lexicon in which all verb stems are arranged according to their meaning and the number of NP arguments they subcategorize. I will take data from Japanese to show that this organization, which I will refer to as paradigmatic structures, makes predictions about meanings associated with morphological derivatives. I will in particular look at the causative morpheme sas to illustrate this. I will further show that the paradigmatic structures are part of a larger system that provides a general constraint on all word formation processes.