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lexical integrity

MORPHOLOGY/SYNTAX: a term used to refer to one of the most important properties of words, viz. the property that NO syntactic process is allowed to refer to parts of a word. EXAMPLE: if we take the English compound teapot, it is not allowed to move tea out of the compound by, for instance, topicalization (cf. *Tea, I bought pots vs. Teapots, I bought). It is furthermore impossible to refer to tea by using an anaphoric device such as a pronoun: we cannot say he took the teai pot, and poured iti into the cup, meaning 'he poured the tea into the cup'. See Lexicalist hypothesis.
LIT. Di Sciullo, A. M. and E. Williams (1987)
Lapointe, (1980)
Spencer, A. (1991)