This chapter discusses the relation of ‘insertion’ between syntax and morphology that is necessary in a model that assigns each of them to its own submodule. The following hypotheses are defended: (i) insertion is an operation of feature matching between nodes in two different representations; the ‘inserted’ structure is not present in the ‘host’ structure; and (ii) insertion is a symmetrical relation in the sense that it does not care what the nature is of the inserted structure and the host structure: structures of either syntactic or morphological nature can be inserted in structures of either syntactic or morphological structure. Insertion of a syntactic structure into another syntactic structure is argued to account for the properties of parentheticals. Insertion of morphological representations in syntactic representations is the traditional case, accounting for the presence of morphologically complex words in syntactic terminals. It is shown that the assumption that the inserted structure is not present in the host structure in this case accounts for lexical integrity effects, including some apparent exceptions to it. Insertion of syntactic representations in morphological representations gives rise to phrasal compounding.
Keywords: parentheticals, lexical integrity, phrasal compounding