ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book begins with a survey of major issues in the works on word formation, many of which adhere to the lexicalist hypothesis, which maintains that word formation belongs solely to the lexicon and does not interact with syntax. Consequently, it is the existence of syntactic rules with morphological operation, which in principle allows a freely generated phrase to be input to word formation, that poses a serious threat to the lexicalist hypothesis. In Japanese, where verbal morphology exhibits typical agglutinative mode of concatenation, however, a large number of suffixes were shown in the remaining chapters to have a phrasal scope. The book argues that one difference between Japanese and English is the lack of the lexical intransitivization rule in the former, and that the difference is reflected in the types of deverbal nominal compounds of these languages.
