Interaction between Morphology and Syntax in the Language of Science: A Case Study in Noun Incorporation and Phrase Formation
The interface between morphology and syntax has been a disputed issue among linguists. The main goal of this research is to investigate the interface between morphology and syntax and represent the existence of interaction between these two structural modules of language. Therefore, we have studied two productive word formation processes in the language of science. One of them is the result of the module of morphology, but we can assign a syntactic substructure to it. The other one is itself a syntactic entity, but it shows some morphological behaviors. These two processes are respectively noun incorporation and the formation of syntactic phrases. For this purpose, 500 terms from the first dictionary of a collection of terms approved by the Academy of Persian Language and Literature, and 500 terms from the sixteenth dictionary of a collection of terms have been chosen randomly and studied in this research. The main framework of this research is the interactional approach. We have also utilized additional tools from other theoretical approaches, such as constructional schemas in construction morphology. The research conducted in this essay depicts the definitions of incorporating nouns, in the dictionaries, to confirm their syntactic structure. On the other hand, losing some syntactic markers in syntactic phrases demonstrates the lexicalization of these structures. This study showed that incorporating nouns had a greater diversity of constructional schemas than syntactic phrases. However, the productivity of syntactic phrases was higher in comparison to incorporating nouns. Furthermore, the usage of syntactic phrases had increased in the ten-year period. As a result, the overall trend was ascending.