Syntactic Affixation and Performance Structures

Abstract

Functional elements (determiners, complementizers, modals, degree words) are in many ways the syntactic analogues of affixes in morphology. Typically, functional elements are bound elements. Phonologically, they are clitics; syntactically, they are unable to appear without an associated thematic element (noun, verb, adjective). I would like to extend the analogy by showing that functional elements also combine with their associated thematic elements to form word-like units I call chunks. For example, the segment of a noun phrase from the determiner to the head noun is a chunk. The ongoing destruction of documents, for instance, consists of two chunks, the ongoing destruction and of documents.