Collocations are not examined adequately within the minimalist program and other earlier mainstream theories because they are relegated to an irregular lexicon that is distinct from a rule-based syntax despite the fact that collocations may have lexical and syntactic properties. In this paper, I argue that we need to relax this this strict division between the lexicon and the syntax in order to account for collocations. The minimalist program can address, as other non-Chomskyan theories, the basic properties of collocations.

This paper discusses some data of ASC in which regular plural inflection is included inside compounds. These data pose problems to Kiparsky’s level-ordering lexical morphology model (1982) and Li’s generalization on verb incorporation (1990). I argue that ASC is lexically formed based on some pieces of evidence. To support the analysis, I compare the compounds and the construct state constructions in Arabic and Hebrew. Then I show that the lexical analysis explains the morphological, syntactic properties, and the semantics of ASC.