Competition between morphological words and multiword expressions

Competition in morphology is generally viewed as a relation holding between words or word formation processes. This article, framed within Construction Morphology, explores another type of competition which is still largely neglected, namely the competition between morphological words (i.e., simple, derived and compound words) and multiword expressions. It shows that competition is at work between these two types of constructions and that it may lead to bidirectional blocking, thus suggesting a view of the mental lexicon where both words and multiword expressions are stored on a par with each other. Competition at different levels of abstraction (specific lexical items vs. patterns of formation) and along different dimensions (synchronic vs. diachronic) is also discussed. Two case-studies from Italian are offered that explore the synchronic competition between (i) the simile construction with color adjectives (rosso come il fuoco ‘red as the fire’) vs. the corresponding compound pattern (rosso fuoco ‘fire-like red’) and (ii) irreversible binomials (sano e salvo ‘safe and sound’) vs. coordinate compounds of the sordomuto ‘deaf-mute’ type. The findings show that even when competition occurs between specific lexical items belonging to different patterns, there is often differentiation at the more abstract level, with different patterns specializing for different functions, as a result of the struggle for existence theorized by Aronoff (2016).