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Subject Restriction

MORPHOLOGY: a constraint proposed in Selkirk (1982) which says that the subject argument of a lexical item may not be satisfied in compound structure. This constraint is meant to account for the observation that the subject (or external argument) of a verb cannot function as the non-head in a synthetic compound. EXAMPLE: next to the sentence the girl swims we do not find the synthetic compound *girl-swimming.
LIT. Roeper, T. and D. Siegel (1978)
Selkirk, E. O. (1982a)
Spencer, A. (1991)