Impossible Words: A Reply to Kent Johnson

• Published in: Mind & language Vol. 20; no. 3; pp. 353 - 356
• Main Authors: Fodor, Jerry, LePore, Ernie
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford, UK; Malden, USA Blackwell Publishing Ltd/Inc 01.06.2005; Blackwell
• Subjects: Cognitive Linguistics; Language; Learning; Lexical Semantics; Lexicon; Linguistics; Meaning; Nonsense Words; Philosophical logics. Philosophy of language; Philosophy; Philosophy of Language; Verbs; Words; Language philosophy
• ISSN: 0268-1064; 1468-0017
• DOI: 10.1111/j.0268-1064.2005.00289.x

A response is offered to Kent Johnson's "From Impossible Words to Conceptual Structure: The Role of Structure and Processes in the Lexicon" (Mind and Language, 2004, 19, 3, 334-358), which rebuts Fodor & Lepore's (1999) refutation of impossible-word arguments advanced by Kenneth Hale & S. J. Keyser (1993) in favor of a hypothesis, widely accepted in cognitive linguistics, that monomorphemic lexical items have internal structure. Johnson's two principal arguments in rebuttal are held to miss the point of Fodor & Lepore's critique of Hale & Keyser's reasoning, as the latters' counterexamples to the hypothesis readily admit alternative explanations: (1) they leave open the possibility that a transitive verb of which the subject is the thematic patient might be a primitive verb & (2) the ungrammaticality of shelve the book on remains regardless of adoption or rejection of the assumed lexicalization of the ungrammatical syntactic structure. 1 Figure, 3 References. J. Hitchcock