How lexical is morphology? The constructicon and the quadripartite architecture of grammar

Following Aronoff (1994), at least two different senses of the term lexicon must be distinguished. The Bloomfieldian sense of the term generally refers to the set containing any sort of entrenched or idiomatic expressions, while the second sense refers to the infinite “set of potential (regularly derived or compounded) lexemes for any given language”. A theory of lexeme formation makes crucial reference to this second sense and actually should keep it sharply distinct from the first one because it’s only this latter that constitutes its real object of investigation. In this paper, this view will be taken seriously as a vantage point from which the relation between the two senses of the lexicon will be investigated. It will be shown that apparent paradoxes given by reduced phrases, phrasal compounds and coordination reduction, far from representing negative evidence, obey a clear ratio which neatly emerges if the multi-faceted perspective of the Constructicon is adopted as the interface of the different modules of grammar.