Roots in Lexicalism and Non Lexicalism: Examples from Hausa
Keywords:
Hausa, Roots, Lexicalism, Non lexicalismAbstract
Lexicalism and Non lexicalism are two main counterpart approaches to morphology within generative grammar. In lexicalism approach, the grammar is divided into two components viz: Lexicon component and syntactic component. While, non-lexicalism which here is ‘Distributed Morphology’, contains only single generative engine ‘syntax’. In Distributed Morphology, ‘generative lexicon’ was rejected and distributed into three lists viz: (a) Morphemes (b) Vocabulary (c) Encyclopedia. However, these approaches view ‘roots’ differently. In lexicalism, ‘roots’ themselves belong to lexical categories such as noun, verb, adjective and adverb. But to non lexicalism ‘Distributed Morphology’, ‘roots’ are a-categorial and no syntactico-semantic features, neither decomposition (Embick, 2015). Roots can only be assigned to categories after merging with category defining heads or categorizers. And even among Distributed Morphology experts, some contended that roots contained underlying phonological properties, before insertion (Embick, 2015). But to others (De Belder 2011, Harley 2014 & Aquaviva 2014) both roots and features are subjected to late insertion mechanism. All these approaches are to be applied and justified by using the data from Hausa Language. The authors of this paper are fluents in Hausa, but most of the data used are derived from secondary sources including published books and journals. Finally, the out-come of this analysis (on roots) supports the non lexicalism ‘Distributed Morphology’ approach than lexicalism approach.
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