Primary vs. secondary vocabulary

Abstract

English vocabulary is divided: a Germanic core inherited from Germanic sources and a second vocabulary borrowed from the Romance family and Classical Greek. Several synchronic criteria divide the two vocabularies. The primary vocabulary still conforms to the general Proto-Germanic rule; stress can only fall on a morpheme's first syllable. In contrast, its secondary vocabulary stress patterns follow Chomsky and Halle's (1968) "Main stress rule" often referred to as the "Romance stress rule." There are several correlations between this stress-based division and morpho-syntactic properties; secondary vocabulary always exhibits regular productive inflection and an analytic grading of adjectives. This study focuses especially on syntactic differences: only primary vocabulary verbs freely combine with post-verbal particles of direction and allow double objects with no preposition. These general properties seem hard to express in lexical terms. Nonetheless, a device proposed here seems to capture both these English-particular characteristics: Secondary vocabulary verbs do not lexically select complements whose lexical heads have the feature +DIRECTION. Though at first glance this condition seems too strong, the essay argues that this restriction can stand when indirect objects are structurally properly analyzed.