Morpholexical Aspects of the -kan Causative in Indonesian

Lingua, 2010

In this paper, I explore the issue of the division of labor between syntax and morphology within the context of the lexicalist vs. nonlexicalist debate on the basis of case studies of phrasal compounds in English and ber-constructions in Indonesian. I first show what challenges these phenomena raise for various existing versions of the lexicalist theory to have a clear grasp of what aspect(s) of the theory must be dropped or improved upon. I then propose (non-lexicalist) alternative accounts of the two phenomena. I show that phrasal compounds can be explained on a par with regular compounding of two simplex roots as a natural consequence of the Multiple Spell-Out model of the Minimalist Program. I provide evidence that ber-constructions in Indonesian are derived via head movement, rejecting potential alternative lexicalist accounts in terms of lexical compounding. I also briefly discuss several architectural design specifications that any model of the morphology-syntax interface must meet. I conclude that the firewall theory of the interface, which determines the degree of the interpenetration between syntax and morphology on a language-particular basis, not only meets these specifications, but also serves as an explanatory model within which the syntax-morphology interaction can be productively pursued. Crown

Lingua, 2014

Argument structure in morphology and syntax: An introduction 1. Where do arguments come from?

Abstract During the past 40 years research of causativity belonged to the central themes of the general and comparative resp. typological linguistics. In this respect it is astonishing, that in my opinion from the Slavic side this subject was treated if at all very marginally in the past. My interest was motivated by the fact that Causatives and Anti-Causatives require an analysis, which touches an interface of morphology, semantics, lexicon, word formation and syntax. Therefore it is also replicable by the Minimalistic Program (with the inclusion of Distributive Morphology). Furthermore, the theme comprises important observations concerning questions of affix ordering, syntactic structures and verb movement. Most syntactic accounts of affix ordering and verb movement follow the theory of incorporation by Mark Baker (1988). In this theory syntactic incorporation is assumed to be an instance of the general syntactic rule Move Alpha, e.g. a syntactic operation that derives morphologically complex words from morphologically basic elements (root, stems, or affixes) by head to head movement via incorporation. Whereas the traditional view on morphology and word formation is that word-formation takes place in lexicon, and that morphological rules are different in nature and apply on different primitive elements than syntactic rules, we shall try to advocate an analysis in which the phenomenon of Anti-Causatives and Causatives has to be derived from different ROOT-Semantics of verbs projecting different trees and syntactic structures by the operations AGREE and MERGE. The Causative Alternation (CAL) will serve as criteria to distinguish between externally and internally caused causation; with help of the CAL the Unaccusativity will be divided into two subgroups: alternating Unaccusative (AU-) verbs and non-alternating Unaccusative (NAU-) verbs. In the following an alternate distinction between AU- and NAU-verbs will be developed, namely the presence/absence of information about how the process to be treated was caused. The universal concept of the encyclopedic lexicon in English, German, Russian and Czech (partly also other European and non European languages) seems to assume four different ROOTS of verbs at base to classify the Anti-Causativity-Opposition: √ agentive (murder, assassinate,cut), √ internally caused (blossom, wilt, grow), √ externally caused (destroy, kill, slay) √cause unspecified (break, open,melt). Moreover, it will be shown that unergative/causative pairs depict an independent phenomenon, which does not affect considerations about CAL (correspondent to Alexiadou et al. 2006a, b, Kosta 2010, 2011; and Marantz 1997, but dissenting Levin & Rappaport Hovav 1995 and Reinhart 2000). This talk is organized as follows: in section 1, I propose a formulation of the MP based on syntactic features; the examples will be taken from Causatives and Anti-Causatives that are derived by affixes (in Russian, Czech, Polish, German, English and some other languages of different types and origins) by head-to-head movement. In section 2, I review some basic facts in support of a syntactic approach to Merge of Causatives and Anti-Causatives, proposing that theta roles are also syntactic Features that merge functional affixes with their stems in a well-defined way. I first try to give some external evidence in showing that Causatives and Anti-Causatives obey a principle of thematic hierarchy early postulated in generative literature by Jackendoff (1972; 43), and later reformulated in terms of argument-structure-ordering principle by Grimshaw (1990:chapter 2). Crucial for my paper is the working hypothesis that every syntactic theory which tries to capture the data not only descriptively but also explanatively should descend from three levels of syntactic representation: a-structure where the relation between predicate and its arguments (and adjuncts) takes place, thematic structure where the theta-roles are assigned to their arguments, and event structure, which decides about the aspectual distribution and division of events.

2013

Analytic causatives are the type of causatives formed by separate predicates expressing the cause and the effect, that is, the causing notion is realized by a word separate from the word denoting the caused activity. This paper aims to discuss the forms and syntactic structure of analytic causatives in Javanese. To discuss the syntactic structure, the theory of lexical functional grammar (LFG) is employed. The data used in this study is the "ngoko" level of Javanese of the Surakarta dialect. By using a negation marker and modals as the syntactic operators to test mono-or bi-clausality of analytic causatives, the writer found that analytic causatives in Javanese form biclausal constructions. These constructions have an X-COMP structure, in that the SUBJ of the second verb is controlled by the OBJ of the causative verb (N)gawe "make". In terms of the constituent structure, analytic causatives have two kinds of structures, which are V-cause OBJ X-COMP and V-cause X-...

The Lexical Semantic Framework (LSF, Lieber, 2004) is concerned with the study of the semantics of word-formation processes. The central goal of LSF is to characterize the meaning of simple lexemes and affixes and to show how these meanings can be integrated in the creation of complex words. LSF offers a systematic treatment of issues that figure prominently in the study of word formation: (a) The polysemy question: why do derivational affixes often exhibit polysemy (e.g. agent, instrument, experiencer, stimulus, patient/theme nouns in-er, as in driver, opener, hearer, pleaser, keeper)? (b) The multiple-affix question: why are there affixes that create the same kind of derived words (i.e. bother and-ant create agent nouns, e.g. writer, accountant)? (c) The zero-derivation question: how do we account for zero-affixation, that is, semantic change with no (overt) formal change (i.e. " conversion ")? (d) The form and meaning mismatches question: why are there instances where the form and meaning correlation is often not one-to-one? LSF has its source in a confluence of research approaches that follow a decompositional approach to meaning and, thus, defines simple lexemes and affixes by way of a systematic representation that is achieved via a constrained formal language that enforces consistency of annotation. Lexical-semantic representations in LSF consist of two parts: the Semantic/Grammatical Skeleton and the Semantic/Pragmatic Body (henceforth 'skeleton' and 'body' respectively). The skeleton is comprised of features that are of relevance to the syntax. These features act as functions and may take arguments. Functions and arguments of a skeleton are hierarchically arranged. The body encodes all those aspects of meaning that are perceptual, cultural, and encyclopedic. Features in LSF are used in (a) a cross-categorial, (b) an equipollent, and (c) a priva-tive way. This means that they are used to account for the distinction between the major ontological categories, may have a binary (i.e. positive or negative) value and may or may not form part of the skeleton of a given lexeme. In order to account for the fact that several distinct parts integrate into a single referential unit that projects its arguments to the syntax, LSF makes use of the Principle of Co-indexation. Co-indexation is a device needed in order to tie together the arguments that come with different parts of a complex word to yield only those arguments that are syntactically active. LSF has an important impact on the study of the morphology-lexical semantics interface and provides a unitary theory of meaning in word formation.