In fact, fixity allows words to be “recycled” in any language and, after all, compound words are nothing but recycled words. 1 This idea is on a par with Slobin’s (1973) observation that “new functions are expressed by old forms”. Indeed, recycling words involves several processes of “supra-word” formation. Our attempt will be to show that LEXEMIC compounding, as opposed to MORPHEMIC compounding, obeys syntactic principles of Universal Grammar (UG) in order to bring about the required fixity within a “lexemic structure”, i.e a supra-word structure.
Our proposals entail an entirely new approach to the problem of compound words in Romance insofar as we strongly deny that a single lexical entry must obligatorily be linked with a single terminal node. In fact, it will be shown that a lexical entry bearing complex syntactic information, as in compounds for instance, must be projected elsewhere than onto a simple terminal node.