Morphological and semantic regularities in the lexicon

This paper proposes a theory of the lexicon consistent with the Lexicalist Hypothesis of Chomsky's ‘Remarks on nominalization’ (1970). The crucial problem is to develop a notion of lexical redundancy rules which permits an adequate description of the partial relations and idiosyncrasy characteristic of the lexicon. Two lexicalist theories of redundancy rules, each equipped with an evaluation measure, are compared on the basis of their accounts of nominalizations; the superior one, the FULL-ENTRY THEORY, is then applied to a range of further well-known examples such as causative verbs, nominal compounds, and idioms.