Syntax versus the lexicon: incorporation and compounding in Modern Greek

As a contribution to the long-standing controversy in linguistics concerning the proper role in the grammar of syntax as opposed to the lexicon and of syntax as opposed to morphology, we study here the proposal made by Rivero 1992 that Modern creek has a productive syntactic rule of Adverb Incorporation, and more generally Argument Incorporation. Based on measures of productivity and on idiosyncrasies in meaning that adverb-plus-verb and object-plus-verb combinations in Greek show, we argue that the phenomena in question are compounds or affixed forms that result from the operation of lexical rules. They are thus quintessentially morphological in nature, rather than syntactic. More generally, we see this outcome as an argument against frameworks in which morphology is collapsed into the syntactic component and in which morphology is not a separate component of grammar.