No nouns, no verbs? A rejoinder to Panagiotidis

In response to Panagiotidis’ objections (Panagiotidis, 2005) to Barner and Bale (2002), we review the questions of overgeneration and predictability of meaning with regards to narrow syntactic explanations of noun-verb innovation (and specifically the case of non-lexicalist theories of grammar). Regarding overgeneration, it is argued that syntactic proposals, whether lexicalist or non-lexicalist, fail to generate ungrammatical strings of the type described by Panagiotidis, and that the productivity of innovation could not be explained by a rule that did. Also, it is argued that a meta-linguistic theory of innovation could not likely improve on syntactic accounts. Regarding the systematicity of meaning, it is argued that while certain lexicalist theories may be committed to the systematicity of derived meanings, non-lexicalist theories like Distributed Morphology are not. We conclude that the systematic interpretation of purely syntactic features supports a narrow syntactic theory of noun-verb innovation, but that the residual idiosyncrasy argues for a non-lexicalist theory where syntactically generated forms need not have meanings that are completely predictable from those of their syntactic parts and internal structures.