Subject Restriction

Definition
Subject Restriction is 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.

Links

 * Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics