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 Greek 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.