Echo reduplication in Kannada and the theory of word-formation

This article demonstrates that Echo Reduplication in Kannada applies equally to words, subparts of words and entire syntactic phrases. Such a rule is problematic for a lexicalist grammatical architecture because it treats the internal structure of words as parallel to the internal structure of sentences, suggesting that there is no clear division between word structure and phrase structure. Numerous variants of the lexicalist architecture are examined and rejected on empirical grounds. The data are analyzed within the framework of Distributed Morphology, in which syntactic structure provides the input to the morphological component. The article goes on to demonstrate that some pieces of morphological structure realize pieces of constituent structure whereas others arise due to featural properties of the syntactic environment of the root.