Why we need roots in Minimalism
Phoevos Panagiotidis, Vitor Nóbrega
January 2022 

In the Minimalist enterprise, the existence of roots is not taken as a tenet, these being generally assumed by non-lexicalist / neoconstructivist approaches to grammar such as DM and the Exoskeletal Model. Nevertheless, the assumption of a separate primitive dedicated to hosting extra-grammatical information — as opposed to functional primitives, such as syntactic features — is entirely compatible with the Minimalist Program, once it paves the way for an in-depth evaluation of the interplay of the lexicon with other components of the Faculty of Language (FL). Assuming roots to be grammatical primitives brings to the forefront of linguistic minimalism the question of what the ‘atoms’ of syntactic computation are, since it demands a rigorous investigation of which properties are inherent to them and which are emergent (i.e., contextually derived), as well as whether their superficial features are packaged as a whole in the same grammatical component.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/006497 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Cambridge Handbook of Minimalism
keywords:	root, minimalism, contentless, acategorial, polysemy, suppletion, late insertion, category, index, evolution, vervet monkey, semitic, greek, morphology, syntax
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