The syntactic source of (some) words

A problem for word-formation studies is that the notion of a word is not well defined (Dixon & Aikhenvald, 2002), and this has implications for questions of productivity in word- formation. One specific problem is whether words can be created by syntactic rules as well as by rules of word-formation, a question which is important in defining a word. In this paper, two such types are considered: sequences of adjective and noun, as in blackbird and also in red squirrel, which seem to require distinct analyses, and types like lady-in-waiting and wannabe where words exploit a wider range of syntactic structures (see also Goldberg & Shirtz, 2025). It is argued that the difference between a word and a syntactic structure is a matter of usage rather than a matter of grammar, largely, but not entirely, determined by how fixed the expression is in common practice.