The Generic Vocabulary and the Opacity of Compounds
Edwin Williams
April 2021 

It is suggested that the Atomicity Condition of Di Sciullo and Williams (1987) be replaced with a condition banning free variables in compound expressions (the Opacity Condition (OC)) as the principal bound on admissibility of X0s in syntax. The OC is put to use to explain the limited extent to which a variety of expression types can occur in compounds; these include Tense, pronouns, contextually varying expressions like "girlfriend" and "nearby", quantificational expressions, ordinals, proper names, and indexicals like "now" and "today". The note concludes with a speculation about why OC holds where it does.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/005909 (please use that when you cite this article)
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keywords:	compound, atomicity of words in syntax, lexical integrity, lexicalist hypothesis, free variable, genericity, morphology, syntax
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