ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the notion of prosodic subcategorization. This device is motivated, in combination with the orthogonal property of morphological subcategorization, as a means of crossclassifying morphemes and morphological strings in terms of their dependence properties. An important obligation of subcategorization frames is encoding selectional restrictions on the host of a dependent morpheme, and both morphological and prosodic frames perform the task. The distinction between active and passive subcategorization is equivalent to the distinction drawn in Lexical Functional Grammar among functional annotations; some feature specifications are marked as constraining equations, and others are not. The chapter describes the independence of morphological and prosodic constituent structure to formulate generic representations of the underlying prosodic and morphological constituency of each of the four possible morpheme types: affixes, roots, clitics, and stems. Malayalam has a number of bound roots, which must combine with a derivational suffix in order to be part of a well-formed word.
