Relating morphology to syntax

2000

I present an analysis of verbal agreement in the ergative languages Chukchi and Koryak (Chukotkan--Kamchatkan paleosiberian) showing that certain aspects of the system pose problems for current versions of Distributed Morphology . First, the agreement prefixes and suffixes exhibit a type of 'split ergativity': the suffixes seem to operate on an essentially absolutive patterning, while the prefixes make reference principally to subject functions. This seems to require reference to subject and object (or nominative and accusative case) as well as ergative and absolutive functions. More seriously, the agreement paradigms for 1st person object show syncretisms with the antipassive paradigms. This is an instance of the take--over of a marked category by an unmarked one, and hence cannot be handled in terms of DM's Impoverishment rules. I conclude that the data support a realizational conception of inflection and sketch an analysis along the lines of Stump (1993b). It is possible to discern two opposing views on the way in which inflectional morphology should be handled. The first regards inflectional formatives (affixes, vowel changes, consonant mutations, reduplications) as morphemes in the structuralist tradition, that is, a pairing of phonological form with meaning or grammatical function. On this view an inflectional formative, or inflectional piece, is a lexical entry, which just happens to have a limited semantic value and heavy constraints on what kinds of morphological objects it can attach to. In other words, there is only a fine dividing line between an inflectional piece and a fully fledged word (in the sense of lexeme).

The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Interfaces, 2007

According to the traditional view, the relation between morphology and syntax is the following: while morphology builds up word forms-typically by combining roots with other roots and with affixes, but also by applying other operations to them, syntax takes fully inflected words as input and combines them into phrases and sentences. The division of labour between morphology and syntax is thus perfect: morphology only operates below the word level whereas syntax only operates above the word level.

A-Morphous Morphology

Acknowledgements have been in the back of my mind ever since I started work on this dissertation. First, I would like to thank the members of my thesis committee. To Ken Hale, my advisor and friend, I owe a great debt. I have enjoyed my career here largely due to Ken's wisdom, enthusiasm and patience. It will become obvious to anyone that his ideas have figured very importantly in the development of this thesis. I am very grateful to Noam Chomsky for his gu1dan~ã nd the challenging ideas he has offered. Thanks go to Jim Harris for offering questions from the morphologist's point of view. Without his perspective, I would have felt alone with some of the concepts that puzzled me. r will certainly not forget my first year here at MIT, due in part to the presence of Morris Halle. Our class had Morris as a teecher for the entire year. What a slave driver-he even held classe$ on holidays. But we all knew that we were privileged to be his students, and that he cared about us.

We are also grateful to Ryo Otuguro and two anonymous reviewers for comments on this paper. Remaining errors are of course solely our own responsibility. Sadler is grateful to the University of Essex for a period of sabbatical leave during which this work was completed, and Nordlinger for the support of the Australian Research Council, grant F9930026, held at the University of Melbourne. 2 Existing work touching on, or having consequences for, these issues includes Ackerman 1990,

Studies in Chinese Linguistics

Phenomena traditionally thought of as morphological can be accounted for in terms of syntactic operations and principles, hence bringing forth questions that traditional morphology fails to ask (for instance, concerning the licensing of empty morphemes). The language faculty contains no specific morphological component, nor any post-syntactic morphological operations.

Studies in comparative Germanic …, 2002

In this paper we revisit V-to-I-movement in Germanic and beyond. We examine and evaluate the hypothesis that there is a correlation between richness of verbal inflectional morphology and the obligatory movement of the finite verb to Infl, which has been adopted in much recent literature. We show that this hypothesis is empirically inadequate, and that in fact V-to-I movement across languages is independent of morphology.

2005

Syncretism – where a single form serves two or more morphosyntactic functions – is a persistent problem at the syntax–morphology interface. It results from a ‘mismatch’ whereby the syntax of a language makes a particular distinction, but the morphology does not. This pioneering book provides the first full-length study of inflectional syncretism, presenting a typology of its occurrence across a wide range of languages. The implications of syncretism for the syntax–morphology interface have long been recognized: it argues either for an enriched model of feature structure (thereby preserving a direct link between function and form), or for the independence of morphological structure from syntactic structure. This book presents a compelling argument for the autonomy of morphology, and the resulting analysis is illustrated in a series of formal case studies within Network Morphology. It will be welcomed by all linguists interested in the relation between words and the larger units of which they are a part.

This paper presents a review of a number of recent issues in the field of generative morphology, with their implications for the description of English. After an introduction to the field two types of question are considered. First, 1 examine the nature of word structure and illustrate two competing approaches, one of which assurnes that words have a constituent structure (much like the phrase structure of syntax) and the other of which rejects this assumption. Then we look at the way morphologicai structure interacts with syntax. We examine the extent to which syntactic principles can account for the behaviour of certain types of compounds and aiso the expression of syntactic arguments in nominaiizations.

2022

Our goal is to develop a semantic theory that is equally suitable for the lexical material (words) and for the larger constructions (sentences) put together from these. In 2.1 we begin with the system of lexical categories that are in generative grammar routinely used as preterminals mediating between syntax and the lexicon. Morphology is discussed in 2.2, where subdirect composition is introduced. This notion is further developed in 2.3, where the geometric view is expanded from the standard word vectors and the voronoids introduced in Chapter 1 to include non-vectorial elements that express binary relations. These eigenspace techniques receive further use in 2.4, where some crucial relational devices of syntactic theory, thematic relations, deep cases, and kārakas are addressed. How much of syntax can be reconstructed with these is discussed in 2.5. 2.1 Lexical categories and subcategories Whether a universal system of lexical categories exists is still a widely debated question. Bloomfield, 1933, and more recently Kaufman, 2009 argued that certain languages like Tagalog have only one category. But the notion that there are at least three major categories that are universal, nouns, verbs, and adjectives, has been broadly defended (Baker, 2003; Chung, 2012; Haspelmath, 2021). 4lang subdivides verbs into two categories: intransitive U and transitive V; retaining the standard N for noun; A for adjective; and also uses D for aDverb; and G for Grammatical formative. While this rough categorization has proven useful for seeking bindings in the original 4 and in other languages, there is no theoretical claim associated to these categories, nei