The lexical integrity hypothesis (LIH) or lexical integrity principle is a hypothesis in linguistics which states that syntactic transformations do not apply to subparts of words. It functions as a constraint on transformational grammar. Words are analogous to atoms in that, from the point of view of syntax, words do not have any internal structure and are impenetrable by syntactic operations. The ideas of this theory are complicated when considering the hierarchical levels of word formation and the broad variation in defining what constitutes a word, and when words are inserted. Different theories have been proposed by linguists to further refine this theory in order to account for cross-linguistic challenges to the LIH. Two linguists, Joan Bresnan of Stanford University and Sam Mchombo of the University of California, Berkeley, maintain the idea of words as unanalyzable units; Bresnan & Mchombo (1995) re-evaluate this theory using evidence from Bantu to resolve clitics' apparent violations of the LIH. They concluded that clitics and their prosodic word hosts are separate entities, thus stipulating that the hypothesis does not govern the prosodic word, but rather, the morphosyntactic word. This hypothesis is incompatible with endoclitics, claimed to exist e.g. in the Udi language. It is also incompatible with Arrernte, a language spoken in the Alice Springs area of Australia. Arrernte reportedly has initial separation where "the first two, or rarely three syllables of a verb can optionally be separated from the remainder of the verb. Intervening material seems to be limited to particles, clitics, pronouns, and simple NPs." (Henderson 2002)
History The LIH is a subset of the lexicalist hypothesis, which states that morphology and syntax do not interact, with the result (among others) that some syntactic operations cannot access word-internal structures. This theory appears to have no single source from which it originates. Despite being widely referred to and debated in linguistics, there is no single attributable source for the Lexical Integrity Hypothesis, nor does there seem to be any single definition, which potentially poses problems for this theory's falsifiability. The hypothesis seems to come about from the consensus that there is a phenomenon that generally and cross-linguistically prevents or limits the interaction between syntax and morphology. Though not referred to by name, the earliest theoretical beginnings of the LIH seems to be from Siegel (1974), while linguist Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy attributes it to Bresnan & Mchombo (1995), even though Bresnan and Mchombo themselves refer to the lexical integrity principle as a given concept within the linguistics canon. While today they are generally distinct theories, the LIH is historically referred to interchangeably with the lexicalist hypothesis, making the origin of the LIH as a concept distinct from the lexicalist hypothesis difficult to pinpoint. However, Bruening (2018) attributes the lexicalist hypothesis, of which the LIH is a subset, to Chomsky (1970).
Interaction between syntax and morphology: Theoretical variations One of the biggest challenges to defining the LIH is in identifying the domain that syntax governs, the domain that morphology governs, and how these two constructs interact. Questions to be entertained, for example, are what constitutes a word and the point in which lexical insertion merges with sentence-level operations. Di Sciullo & Williams (1987) is frequently used as a foundation for many explorations of the LIH. In this book, linguists Anna Maria Di Sciullo and Edwin S. Williams explore the concept of word atomicity, as well as the framing of syntax within the idea of a "sentence form" wherein sentences are skeletal placeholders of lexical items, such as listemes, which are lexical constituents that are stored in the lexicon as opposed to generated by rules. Booij (2009) redefines LIH as a principle that excludes two interactions between syntax and morphology: having access to word-internal structure, and being able to manipulate parts of word-internal structure--where manipulation is the syntactic movement, or the splitting of a word-constituent. He asserts that for a lexical unit to be a word, the impossibility of such manipulation is a necessary requirement. This prohibition on movement may serve as a test to find out whether a morpheme sequence is a word, or a phrasal compound. Rochelle Lieber, a linguist at the University of New Hampshire and Sergio Scalise of the University of Bologna propose the idea of a limited access principle in which there is no hard wall between the division of syntax and morphology. Rather, there is a figurative filter that permits some syntactic operations on lexical items. This is evidenced by the fact that languages permit syntactic structures to be "downgraded" to words in that syntactic phrases can be merged into lexical items over time. Professors Antonio Fábregas of the University of Tromsø, Elena Felíu Arquiola of the University of Jaén and Soledad Varela of the Autonomous University of Madrid, use the concept of a morphological local domain in their discussion of the LIH, in which words have multiple binary branching layers composed of roots and functional projections, with the deeper layers of the morphological hierarchy being too far away for the syntax to see and only the higher head of this multi-layered morphological tree has the ability to transmit information. Additionally, some theories of syntax appear to be incompatible with the LIH, such as minimalism. Lieber and Scalise argue that Chomsky's version of strict minimalism necessitates lexical items to be fully formed before entering syntactic operations. However, Dikken (2002) proposes that syntactic and lexicalist approaches may be reconciled through a checking approach. Checking assumes words are built in the lexicon, and subparts of these words have features attached. These features are then checked to find matching features within the functional heads of the syntactic structures which the words are part of. Dikken asserts that syntax does not only refer to the internal structure of words; it also looks at the properties of subparts of complex words.
Theory
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