Abstract This book is volume III of a trilogy which explores the difference between words however defined and structures however constructed. The trilogy sets out to demonstrate that the explanation of linguistic competence should be shifted from lexical entries to syntactic structure, from the memorizing of listed information to the manipulation of grammatical rules. Its reformulation of how grammar and listed items interact has profound implications for linguistic, philosophical, and psychological theories about the human mind and language. The book departs from both constructional approaches to syntax and the long generative tradition that uses the word as the nucleus around which the syntax grows. It argues that the hierarchical, abstract structures of language are universal, not language specific, and that language variation emerges from the morphological and phonological properties of grammatical functors, or more specifically, inflection. This volume applies this approach to the construction of complex words. The book develops a new model of word formation, arguing that the basic building blocks of language are on the one hand rigid semantic and syntactic functions, and on the other hand, roots, which in themselves are but packets of phonological information, and are devoid of both meaning and grammatical properties of any kind. Within such a model, syntactic category, syntactic selection and argument structure are all mediated through syntactic structures projected from rigid functions, or alternatively, constructed through general combinatorial principles of syntax, such as Chomsky's Merge. The meaning of ‘words’, in turn, does not involve the existence of lexemes, but rather the matching of a well-defined and phonologically articulated syntactic domain with conceptual Content, itself outside the domain of language as such. In a departure from most current models of syntax but in line with many philosophical traditions, then, the Exo-Skeletal model partitions ‘meaning’ into formal functions, on the one hand, and Content, on the other hand. While the former are read off syntactico-semantic structures as is usually assumed, Content is crucially read off syntactico-phonological structures.
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