Greek derivational structures: restrictions and constraints

This paper investigates the general principles governing the combination of a base with a particular suffix. Elaborating on the well-known conflict between base-driven and affix-driven selectional restrictions, we argue in favor of affix-driven selection. We claim that the various selectional restrictions imposed by the suffixes are inherent specifications, which characterize their entries at the lexical level; if suffixes are heads of derivational structures, these restrictions pass from heads to the derived items through percolation. Additionally, we propose that, beside selectional restrictions, the combinatorial behaviour of suffixes may be determined by a number of other lexically-specified properties such as the ‘unique suffix’ or ‘closing suffix’. Finally, we claim that derivational structures are also governed by language-independent or language-specific constraints, operating on input structures.