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Mapping Principle

SYNTAX: principle proposed in Marantz (1984) to relate independently constructed levels of representation to each other. In Marantz' model there are three levels of syntactic representation, logico-semantic structure (l-s-structure), syntactic structure (s-structure), and surface structure, together with a lexicon whose lexical entries contain information about argument structure, transitivity, semantic roles etc. The Mapping Principle guarantees that crucial aspects of structure, specifically those relating to grammatical relations, are automatically preserved from one level to the next.
LIT. Marantz, A. (1984)

MORPHOLOGY: principle proposed by Sproat (1985)to relate the phono-morphological and the syntactico-semantic level of representation of complex words to each other. He basically proposes the Mapping Principle to account for the so-called bracketing paradoxes. EXAMPLE: A standard example of a bracketing paradox is ungrammaticality. The phono-morphological representation of this form will include the information that un- is an unstressed prefix, and that -ity is a suffix which attracts stress to the previous syllable. The syntactico-semantic representation will include the information that un- selects adjectives and means 'NOT', and that -ity creates abstract nouns from adjectives. Furthermore, at the phono-morphological level hierarchical structure plays a relatively small role. Instead, strict adjacency tends to be much more relevant. On the other hand, at the syntactico-semantic level, linear order seems to be of little importance. Here, hierarchical structure or sisterhood between morphemes is crucial. At the syntactico-semantic level the representations of ungrammaticality in (i) are equivalent, since linear order is irrelevant. At the phono-morphological level the representations of ungrammaticality in (ii) are also equivalent, since hierarchical structure is irrelevant at this level of representation:

(i)  [[UN [GRAMMATICAL]A ]A ITY]N <=> [ITY [UN [GRAMMATICAL]A ]A ]N 
   <=> [[GRAMMATICAL]A UN]A ITY]N <=> [ITY [[GRAMMATICAL]A UN]A ]N
 
(ii) [[un [grammatical]] ity] <=> [un [[grammatical] ity]]
Sproat defines his Mapping Principle in such a way that [[un [grammatical]] ity] can be rebracketed as [un [[grammatical] ity]], since morphological principles such as level ordering demand it.
LIT. Spencer, A. (1991)