ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the basic background for theoretical issues in treatment of the role of the lexicon in grammar and properties of word formation in general. It discusses the development of ‘lexicalism’ concerning the boundary between syntax and the lexicon. The chapter also discusses a number of claims that have been made about the properties of word formation and the organization of the lexicon; some of them are specifically for English, but many of them are supposed to hold across languages. It proposes that notion of ‘rule typology’ applied to the syntax/lexicon dichotomy is one fruitful way of acquiring a realistic view of the interaction of two components. Once the word-level derivation was considered not to be part of syntax but of the lexicon, it was natural move to capture the regularities of morphological derivation by some form of rules which are separate from syntactic rules. The chapter also provides survey of trends in the study of word formation in Japanese.
