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Arguments for a root

The last two decades have seen a renewed effort to identify the building blocks of syntax. Within a theory that decomposes lexical items into roots and catego­ rizing heads, the only distinction in the types of units manipulated by syntactic operations is between features (grouped into morphemes) of functional heads (both category­defining and ‘traditional’ functional heads) on the one hand, and acategorial roots (the only lexical elements), on the other. Current studies of the nature and behaviour of functional heads have benefited directly from previous research in formal grammar. Contemporary studies of roots, in contrast, have needed to start afresh in the investigation of the roles, if any, roots play in the syntactic computation. Harley’s paper On the identity of roots directly investigates the nature of roots and, in particular, their behaviour as syntactic units. Taking on a debate within the framework of Distributed Morphology as a starting point, she argues that roots are indeed individuated in the syntactic derivation. This in­ dividuation, however, involves a “purely formal notion of root identity”, and does not depend either on the root’s phonological shape or on its semantic properties. After the syntactic derivation, roots as terminal nodes are associated – on the basis of their identifying index – with a phonological exponent and an inter­ pretation. These remarkable conclusions, in turn, open up new questions whose investigation becomes relevant for the various formal models of grammar. In par­ ticular, Harley asks three main questions: 1. What is the syntactic behaviour of roots? Do roots act as heads which take arguments and project into phrases? 2. Does phonological and semantic interpretation of roots fall under particular conditions? Is there a strictly local domain? 3. What are the limits to the morphosyntactic environment that can affect the idiosyncratic semantic and phonological interpretations of a root?