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This article presents an apparent locality condition violation observed in Standard Breton masculine human plurals ending in -où. It proposes a unique impoverishment rule deleting a syntacticosemantic feature conditioned by a specified phonological exponent. Adopting a specific architectural view of lenition, it forces a rethinking of the precise timing of various postsyntactic processes, including certain types of impoverishment rules as well as Agree-Copy in dissociated Agr nodes. It also lends support to the independent claims that syntacticosemantic features are not overridden during Spell-Out and that Vocabulary Insertion applies to a linearized structure, not a hierarchical one.

The decompositional, non-lexicalist, approach to word-structure and the theory of roots have proven highly rewarding. One grey area, however, comes from Romance since, rather than roots, the word structure primitive appears to be the stem: root + ‘stem-formative/theme vowel’. Regardless, there have been perspicacious decompositional accounts of Italian, however these are still marred by the large number of morphological/item-specific irregularities, motivating arbitrary noun classes. Additionally, there are roots that do not inflect: consonant-final and vowel-final forms when these are oxytonic or loanwords. Given these irregularities, previous analyses in Italian have included the use of lexical exceptions and class features. We challenge the use of class features in generating the attested patterns (and their exceptions). Instead, we propose a new categorisation of root-shapes, which, when combined with the exponents of nominal inflection, produce the correct surface pairings, as well as the non-alternating forms. In our analysis, there is no diacritic or special marking of lexical exceptions, all forms inflect regularly in accordance to their phonological shape. This requires the innovation of one new mechanism (Inhibition), but we back it up by showing that it leads to an unexpected beneficial prediction that solves a long-standing problem associated with Raddoppiamento Sintattico (RS).

Minimalist Morphology predicts that allomorphy is conditioned inward and locally, and that the domains of morphosyntactically and phonologically conditioned allomorphy selection are identical. Amy Rose Deal and Matthew Wolf have put forward two cases of allomorphy in Nez Perce that appear to be conditioned by an outward phonological context. I present an analysis of Nez Perce morphology and phonology which supports the conclusion that the first case is not outward-conditioned, and the second case is not allomorphy but phonology.

This article accounts for the traditionally-labelled Level 1/Level 2 affix distinction in English by combining the predictions of floating segmental structure (e.g. Rubach 1996) and cyclic spell-out by phase (Chomsky 1999; Marantz 2007). It offers insight not only into the different phonological patterns these affixes trigger, but importantly, explains when the same affix will trigger distinct phonological patterns (when an affix behaves sometimes as Level 1 and sometimes as Level 2). It is argued that Level 1 affixes are distinguished by an initial floating vowel in their underlying representations, and that if we combine this with the proposal that affixes that merge directly to roots are interpreted in the same phonological cycle as these roots then we can remove the reference to diacritic notions such as Level 1 and Level 2 from the grammar. This then allows for a fully modular account of English affix classes, where the phonological derivation refers solely to phonological representations.

One of the main discussions about the interaction between morphology and syntax revolves around the richness or poverty of features and wherever this richness/poverty is found either in the syntactic structure or the lexical items. A phenomenon subject to this debate has been syncretism, especially in theories that assume late insertion such as Distributed Morphology. This paper delves into the syncretism observed between the first person plural and the third person in the clitic domain in some Spanish dialects. Our analysis will lead to a revision of the distribution of person features and their relationship with plural number, while at the same time it will shed light on other morphological alternations displayed in Spanish dialects; that is, subject-verb unagreement and mesoclisis in imperatives. In order to explain the behavior of the data under discussion, I propose that lexical items are specified for all the relevant features at the moment of insertion, although the values of these features can be neutralized. I argue that the distribution proposed allows for some fundamental generalizations about the vocabulary inventories in Spanish varieties, and shows that the variation pattern exhibits an *ABA effect, i.e., only contiguous cells in a paradigm are syncretic.

Within Distributed Morphology, it has been proposed that the lexical vocabulary consists of Roots: category-less primitives. The motivation for Roots is connected with a line of argument reaching back to Chomsky's “Remarks on Nominalization” concerning the representation of lexical categories and their role in syntax. At the center of the theory of Roots is the Two Domains Intuition: the idea that there are two different types of domains in which grammatical interactions (form: allomorphy; meaning: allosemy) occur. Roots are posited as part of an argument against lexicalist approaches to the Two Domains Intuition that reduce it to a modular distinction between the lexicon and the syntax. In place of the modular distinction, Root-based approaches hypothesize that domain differences are derivative of syntactic locality effects in a way that connects with the phase theory of Minimalist syntax. This review examines developments leading to current versions of a Roots-and-contexts theory. A particular focus is on the idea that separating lexical Roots from the morphemes that categorize them is essential to defining the distinct locality domains that are posited to explain the effects subsumed under the Two Domains Intuition.

In this paper we consider several instances of the Slovenian affix ov, which surfaces in many, apparently unrelated contexts. Here we focus on (i) ov in verbs, where it can act as an imperfectivizer or a verbalizer, (ii) ov found in possessive adjectives and kind adjectives derived from nouns, (iii) ov which precedes the adjectiviser (e)n in denominal adjectives, and (iv) ov in nominal declension (acting as a genitive case ending in dual and plural or as a dual/plural augment). Building on the observation that certain affixes function either as inflectional or as derivational (see Simonović and Arsenijević 2020), and working within a Distributed Morphology approach which postulates that derivational affixes should be analyzed as roots (e.g. Lowenstamm 2014), we argue for a single multifunctional ov. This ov is a potentially meaningless root that can take as a complement other roots (thus forming a “radical core”) or phrases, resulting in different structures and consequently different stress patterns and meanings, but can also act as an Elsewhere allomorph, whose insertion is guided by an interplay of phonological and morphological constraints.

This paper proposes a new diagnostic for the detection of stative sub-events in the decomposition of verbal predicates. The diagnostic is based on a certain type of presupposition triggered by additive operators like Greek ke ‘also’, which we call Stative Presuppositions. It is argued that the generation of such Stative Presuppositions requires the existence of a syntactically accessible constituent that denotes a predicate of states that additive operators can take scope over. We investigate the distribution of Stative Presuppositions and observe that not all verbs that support inferences to a result state give rise to them. Based on this distribution we argue for a non-uniform analysis of result verbs; whereas some verbs require an event-decompositional analysis, others are better captured by scalar- and incrementality-based analyses. We cast our analysis in the framework of Distributed Morphology and propose to explain non-uniformity based on how different types of verbal roots interact with verbal functional material. Moreover, treating roots as the locus of encyclopedic information explains lexical variation in the generation of Stative Presuppositions within sub-classes of result verbs. We strengthen our conclusions by considering and rejecting alternative syntactic and semantic mechanisms for generating Stative Presuppositions. We conclude that the availability of Stative Presuppositions with additive operators is currently the most reliable diagnostic for the detection of syntactically accessible result states in verbal decomposition.

Much work in Distributed Morphology ( Embick 2010 , 2015 , Bobaljik 2012 , Harley, Tubino, and Haugen 2017 , Bobaljik and Harley to appear ) holds that morphosyntactically conditioned contextual allomorphy, including suppletion, can only work in a very local fashion: two morphemes must be linearly or structurally adjacent for one to determine the morphological exponence of the other. Recently, however, the existence of nonlocal patterns has come into focus, with growing evidence that nonlocal allomorphy is an attested empirical option. 1 In this squib, I discuss the allomorphy of verb stems in the Nakh-Daghestanian language Aqusha Dargwa and argue that the choice between allomorphs in morphological causatives in that language is determined nonlocally by tense-aspect-mood (TAM), proposing that Vocabulary Insertion (VI) can be exempt from locality requirements under certain conditions.

This study shows how what has been originally ascribed to the ‘lexicon’ is ‘distributed’ among different components of syntax and how degrees are compositionally introduced across categories by investigating the syntax and semantics of the Taiwanese Mandarin X hěn da construction. In this construction, degrees are compositionally introduced by the literally vacuous adjective da ‘DA’, which contributes a structure-preserving map from entities, events or states to their measures along various dimensions (Wellwood in Linguist Philos 38(1):67–101, 2015). Syntactically, the constituent hěn da ‘HEN DA’ functions to be predicated of the root of the X component at the root-level, and the root later must move into the corresponding light head position to be categorically defined.

Psycholinguistic research on the processing of morphologically complex words has largely focused on debates about how/if lexical stems are recognized, stored, and retrieved. Comparatively little processing research has investigated similar issues for functional affixes. In Word or Lexeme Based Morphology (Aronoff 1994), affixes are not representational units on par with stems or roots. This view is in stark contrast to the claims of linguistic theories like Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993), which assign rich representational content to affixes. We conducted a series of eight visual lexical decision studies, evaluating effects of derivational affix priming along with stem priming, identity priming, form priming, and semantic priming at long and short lags. We find robust and consistent affix priming (but not semantic or form priming) with lags up to 33 items, supporting the position that affixes are morphemes, i.e., representational units on par with stems. Intriguingly, we find only weaker evidence for the long-lag stem priming effect found in other studies. We interpret this potential asymmetry in terms of the salience of different morphological contexts for recollection memory.

Speakers use words to communicate. This may seem obvious, but obvious things can also be the most difficult to explain. Because what sets one word (or in sign languages, one sign) apart from another? Words have some kind of internal structure, but this structure can only be discovered by comparing words with one another. And while words and their subparts consist of phonemes, the latter are not associated with meanings themselves. Thus, understanding how exactly meaning and form relate in morphology is a non-trivial task. In this introductory article to the special issue, we would like to elucidate a specific view of morpheme-based morphology by reconsidering the relationship between form and meaning in morphology.

This article proposes a novel account for the overuse of free morphemes and underuse of bound morphemes in English as a second language (L2) based on the framework of Distributed Morphology. It will be argued that an Economy Principle ‘Do everything in Narrow Syntax (DENS)’ operates in the L2 learner’s computational system. Consequently, derivation in Morphology becomes as limited as possible except when applying Vocabulary Items to syntactic objects (Vocabulary Insertion). This results in non-target-like use/acceptance of certain morphemes: Bound morphemes are often omitted in early L2 grammar, and alternative free morphemes may apparently be used instead. Two types of data, namely the overuse of be reported in previous research, and the preference of to-infinitives over -ing gerunds in early L2 grammar, will be presented in support of the proposal, and the plausibility of the operation of DENS will be discussed.

The abstract is available here: https://uscholar.univie.ac.at/o:1087144

In many languages a set of adjectives are characterized by their “past/passive” participial morphology. Lexicalist and syntactic approaches to word formation converge on the claim that such adjectives can be derived from verbal inputs with no external argument but never from verbal inputs with an external argument. That is, there are “adjectival passives” but no “adjectival antipassives” marked with the same morphology. I argue that a sub-class of adjectives marked with the “past/passive” participial morpheme –do in Spanish, labeled participios activos in descriptive grammars, should be treated as adjectival antipassives in precisely this sense. I propose that Spanish has an Asp head that (i) is spelled out with “past/passive” participial morphology and (ii) selects an unergative verbal input creating a state/property whose argument corresponds to the external argument of that verbal source. If on the right track, the proposal supports the existence of a typology of adjectivizing heads that are spelled out uniformly with “past/passive” participial morphology but must be distinguished in terms of selectional and semantic properties (Bruening 2014, Word formation is syntactic: Adjectival passives in English. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 32. 363–422; Embick 2004, On the structure of resultative participles in English. Linguistic Inquiry 35. 355–392). It differs from previous approaches in claiming that such a typology must include root-derived adjectives, as well as ‘active (=unergative)’ and ‘passive’ deverbal adjectives.

In this paper I argue for a syntactic analysis to gender assignment in codeswitched speech. To sustain this claim, I examine gender assignment in Spanish Det(erminer)–English noun switches (i.e., el bishop ‘the.m’) in 76 sociolinguistic interviews of approximately one hour each from a bilingual community in Southern Arizona, U.S. (The CESA Corpus, Carvalho 2012). Based on the findings from this dataset, I demonstrate that the distribution of gender assignment in codeswitched speech poses a serious challenge to current models of the bilingual architecture rooted in the distinct-lexicons perspective (MacSwan 2000 et seq.). Rather, I show that biological gender (interpretable gender) plays a crucial role in the assignment mechanism and the representation of gender features in the bilingual architecture. Taking gender assignment as a case study, I outline a single-lexicon approach to the bilingual grammar compatible with a Late Insertion view of the morphosyntactic model (Halle a Marantz 1993). In particular, I highlight the crucial relevance of a theme position at the morphological module to guide the bilingual speaker to the insertion of phonological matrices (language exponents) when codeswitching.

Data from the perfect in Classical Greek provide empirical evidence for inwardly– and outwardly–sensitive span–conditioned allomorphy and indicate the need for a post–Vocabulary Insertion linearization process. The data also support the extremely late computation of the phonology of reduplicants. Perfect aspect in Classical Greek is realized via three distinct exponents: a reduplicative prefix, a suffix -/k/ (for some verbs) or stem allomorphy (for others), and a dedicated set of agreement suffixes. I argue that this case of Multiple Exponence results from one direct exponent of the Aspect[perfect] head and two cases of allomorphy at other nodes conditioned by spans that include the Aspect[perfect] head. The reduplicant is a Vocabulary Item (RED) that instantiates Aspect. Its phonology is determined after both Vocabulary Insertion and linearization. The -/k/ suffix is an outwardly–sensitive allomorph of Voice[active] conditioned by the span ⟨Aspect, Tense⟩, and perfect stem allomorphy in verbs that show it is conditioned by ⟨Voice, Aspect, Tense⟩. The agreement suffixes are inwardly–sensitive allomorphs conditioned by the span ⟨Voice, Aspect, Tense, Mood⟩. When taken together, the data indicate that Vocabulary Insertion must proceed cyclically, and that linearization must happen very late – after Vocabulary Insertion – since the realizations of both Voice[active] and AGR are conditioned by spans of hierarchically adjacent, rather than surface–contiguous, heads. The Greek data are essential for our understanding of the post–syntactic order of operations.

In this squib I propose a modification to Radkevich’s (2010) analysis of the locative cases, such that the privative features [source] and [goal] replace Radkevich’s binary features [±motion] and [±source]. I argue that these changes improve Radkevich’s analysis in three ways. The first improvement is empirical; they allow her system to account for the data of Kunimaipa, a language spoken in Papua New Guinea, which it presently cannot account for. The second improvement is also empirical; the analysis now predicts the absence of the unattested Ablative-Allative syncretism, which is not explained by alternative analyses. The final improvement is theoretical; a system employing privative features is to be preferred over one with binary features, because it is simpler (Occam’s razor).

Rolle (2020) identifies an apparent morphophonological conspiracy in serial verb constructions (SVCs) in Degema. He argues that it constitutes evidence for a partly-unified postsyntactic module, in which morphology and prosody are built in parallel (by ‘Optimality-Theoretic Distributed Morphology’). We argue that the pattern Rolle identifies in Degema SVCs instead results from the simultaneous interaction of two independently-attested syntax-prosody phenomena: (1) the pressure for adjacent verbs in an SVC to form a single prosodic unit, and (2) the suppression of redundant agreement within a single prosodic word (a.k.a. ‘Kinyalolo’s Generalization’). Thus the Degema SVC conspiracy can be localized to the syntax-prosody interface, and there is no need to adopt a unified postsyntactic morphology-prosody module like Rolle’s. We offer some further conceptual critiques of his model.

In languages that assign stress differently according to morphological structure, affixes often fall into different categories. In Brazilian Portuguese, normal suffix words have one stress (Base: [kaˈfɛ] ‘coffee’; suffixed: [kafe-ˈtejɾa] ‘coffee pot’). Special suffix words are claimed to have two stresses, one of which falls in the same location as in the independent base ([ka ˌfɛ-ˈzĩɲu] ‘coffee-DIM’). The special suffixes include diminutive -(z)inho, superlative -íssimo, and adverbial -mente. This paper reports on a production study showing that stress maintenance on the base of special suffix words is acoustically present through longer duration and marginally higher intensity, and through maintenance of vowel height for mid vowels. Phonologically, the special suffixes are often analyzed as attaching to an independent prosodic word base (e.g.Collischonn 1994; Moreno 1997; Vigário 2003; Guzzo 2018). I cast the analysis in Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993): the phonological differences between special and normal suffixes are due to morphosyntactic differences. Under this analysis, differences between special and normal suffixes are principled rather than arbitrary. Morphological and prosodic structure are both necessary, and prosodic structure mediates between morphology and phonological processes.

This paper proposes a new approach to Romance demonstrative-reinforcer constructions. The account is based on a binary valued feature system for deictic person and is embedded in the Distributed Morphology framework. Looking at data from Romance varieties, some (implicit) shortcomings of previous accounts are repaired via a morphological operation: Fission. Specifically, those accounts do not provide formal means to make sense of the deictic compatibility constraint between the demonstrative and its reinforcer, nor do they discuss categorisation issues relative to reinforcers. Via Fission, instead, a featural reason is given to ensure deictic compatibility, and I put forward a new approach to the category of reinforcers, aiming to overcome their problematic categorisation as DP-internal adverbs.

This paper proposes a new approach to Romance demonstrative-reinforcer constructions. The account is based on a binary valued feature system for deictic person and is embedded in the Distributed Morphology framework. Looking at data from Romance varieties, some (implicit) shortcomings of previous accounts are repaired via a morphological operation: Fission. Specifically, those accounts do not provide formal means to make sense of the deictic compatibility constraint between the demonstrative and its reinforcer, nor do they discuss categorisation issues relative to reinforcers. Via Fission, instead, a featural reason is given to ensure deictic compatibility, and I put forward a new approach to the category of reinforcers, aiming to overcome their problematic categorisation as DP-internal adverbs.

This paper deals with the possessive constructions in Italo-Romance dialects compared with the possessive constructions of one Francoprovençal (Gallo-Romance) variety spoken in Faeto (Foggia, Apulia). Francoprovençal possessive constructions are at a first glance distinct from Central and Southern Italian possessive constructions, mainly since in Francoprovençal (as in French) possessive forms (clitics) are prenominal. In Central and Southern Italian dialects, we find instead a split possession: 1) postnominal enclitic possessives (weak possessive markers) associated with parental kinship nouns distinct from 2) prenominal possessives associated with common nouns and postnominal strong possessive forms. Crucially, I claim that enclitic possessives are inflexional affixes, that receive a structural word-internal linearization from the same external (syntactical) linearization identified for proclitic possessive markers (in Faeto). I retain that the distinction between postnominal weak enclitics in Italian dialects and Francoprovençal weak prenominal possessive constructions is based on the inalienability (parental kin nouns + enclitics in DP). All possessive clitics (proclitics and enclitics) show a common syntactic configuration and differ only in Distributed Morphology, according to a “late” feature insertion and operations after syntax. Indeed, the possessive determiners represent three different morphological spells out of the same syntactic object: the bundle of features [Person], [(Gender) Number], [Definite], generated in functional heads.

In this paper I will provide a new argument for post-syntactic morphology. The empirical evidence comes from so-called displaced morphology in German verb clusters, where the non-finite verb form selected by a given governor does not appear on the immediately dependent verb but rather on the linearly last verb of the selector’s complement. The placement of the morphology thus partly depends on linear notions and not exclusively on hierarchical relations. I will provide an analysis within Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz in The view from Building 20. Essays in linguistics in honour of Sylvain Bromberger, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp 111–176, 1993), where exponents for non-finite morphology are inserted into separate functional heads which are linearized after their VP-complements. At a late stage of the PF-derivation, the exponents are associated with their verbal hosts by means of Local Dislocation, an operation that applies under adjacency (Embick and Noyer in Linguist Inq 32(4):555–595, 2001). As a consequence, the non-finite morphology always comes last in the selector’s complement. Displacement arises once the immediately dependent verb is not the last verbal element in the complement of its selector; this is generally the case in strictly ascending orders, while in the strictly descending 321 order the morphology is faithfully realized. The placement operation is thus always the same, displacement only emerges as a side effect of certain cluster orders. Further evidence for a post-syntactic approach to the placement of non-finite morphology and against a pre-syntactic perspective comes from the absence of semantic effects under displacement, the emergence of non-finite verb forms specified for more than one non-finite category under multiple displacement and the distribution of default forms.

This paper provides support for a modified DM model which I call Optimality-Theoretic Distributed Morphology (OT-DM). The strongest form of this model is that all morphological operations take place in parallel, which I call the Morphology in Parallel Hypothesis (MPH). Although combining OT and DM is unorthodox in practice, I show that a growing body of data warrants this modification (Trommer 2001a, 2001b, 2002; Dawson 2017; Foley 2017; a.o.). I provide support for OT-DM from the distribution of verbal clitics in Degema, a language of southern Nigeria. Within, I argue that agreement clitics are inserted post-syntactically via the DM operation Dissociated Node Insertion (DNI), and further that verb complexes are formed post-syntactically via the operation Local Dislocation (LD), operating in tandem with a well-formedness markedness constraint which requires verbs to appear in properly inflected words. These DM operations are decomposed into a series of constraints which are crucially ranked. Candidates are freely generated from gen and are subject to all DM operations, and are evaluated via eval against the ranked constraint set. I illustrate that under the standard serial DM model in which DNI proceeds VI, this would result in the wrong output form, and that even after parameterizing DM operation order in response, this model does not adequately capture the motivations behind the morphological patterns.

This article provides initial evidence that the head K, which may spell out as case morphology, drives the operations of concord within the noun phrase. Evidence for this claim comes from three code-switching varieties: Basque/Spanish, German/Turkish and Russian/Kazakh. By placing the switch at the border between case morphology and the rest of the noun phrase the properties of K can be isolated and inspected. We find that if K is drawn from the lexicon of a non-concord language, constituents within the noun phrase adopt a default morphology. It is suggested that the data presented in this paper provide evidence for approaches that take Concord to be a form of Agree (probe, goal) and against an approach that takes it to be the result of feature percolation from the bottom up. An analysis of default morphology is proposed that argues that default forms are inserted as vocabulary items in syntactic terminals that, as a result of a failure of Agree, are populated with unvalued features.

This paper discusses verbal stem allomorphy in Romance within the framework of Distributed Morphology (DM). We will present several technical instruments provided by the framework, applying them to an analysis of Romance verbal forms, with a particular focus on stem suppletion with the verb go. We conclude that the best solution to the problem of form–function discrepancies, as they appear in suppletion (but not only), is a spanning approach. This approach operates at Vocabulary Insertion only, without any need for the assumption of further, often critically discussed, morphological processes, such as fusion or pruning.

This paper adopts a morphological approach to the reduplication of the past-tense augment in Cypriot Greek and explores the morphotactic constraints that apply. Phonological reduplication phenomena have been addressed in morphology by developing a framework that can account for both doubling and metathesis. This phenomenon has been a focus of discussion, but less is known about the application of this mechanism to tense prefixes, known as augments. Doubling of the augment appears in verbal complexes depending on the position of its components, what I will argue are cases that support the post-syntactic morphological doubling and metathesis analysis in Distributed Morphology. The data from this non-standard variety provide a novel analysis of augments and contribute to a better understanding of their distribution by redefining this phenomenon as morphological and supporting a unified framework for the formalism designed to account for similar post-syntactic morphological phenomena.

This paper addresses the classification of morphemes in a generative framework. Referring to existing theoretical models of generative morphosyntax (e.g. Distributed Morphology), it demonstrates that a traditional long-standing taxonomic distinction reflects formal, i.e. structural (and derivational) distinctions. Using the well-known examples of the English multi-functional nominalizer -ing and some parallel data in Czech, the study reinterprets morphological taxonomy in terms of three levels, namely the (i) lexical, (ii) syntactic and (iii) post-syntactic insertion of grammatical formatives. It shows that the level of insertion in a syntactic derivation results in predictable (and attested) diagnostics for the multi-morpheme exponents.

This paper brings novel data to bear on whether nominal concord relationships are formed in the narrow syntax or post-syntactically. In Guébie, a Kru language spoken in Côte d’Ivoire, nominal concord marking on non-human pronouns and adjectives is determined not by syntactic or semantic features of the concord-triggering noun, but by the phonological form of the noun. Specifically, concord marking on pronouns and adjectives surfaces as a vowel with the same backness features as the vowels of the head noun. Assuming that syntax is phonology-free (Pullum & Zwicky 1986, 1988), the fact that we see phonological features conditioning nominal concord in Guébie means that nominal concord must take place in the post-syntax. I expand on post-syntactic models of nominal concord in Distributed Morphology (Kramer 2010, Norris 2014, Baier 2015) showing that when combined with a constraint-based phonology, such an approach can account for both phonologically and syntactico-semantically determined concord systems. Additionally, the proposed analysis includes a formal account of ellipsis via constraints during the phonological component.

Indefinite and possessive pronouns in German such as ein-es ‘one’ and mein-er ‘mine’ bear strong inflectional endings unlike their determiner counterparts. Following Saab and Liptak (Stud Linguist 70(1):66–108, 2016), I argue that this difference in inflection is due to NP ellipsis, which creates a ‘stranded’ affix that subsequently docks onto the determiner. Assuming that adjectives are reattached by Local Dislocation allows us to account for the descriptive observation that the determiner and pronominal paradigms differ only in the same three exceptional cases where determiners do not bear overt inflection. Furthermore, I discuss how this approach can extend to similar data from Afrikaans, Dutch and English, as well as to split topicalization constructions in German. This analysis provides further support for Saab and Liptak’s proposal that inflection emerges as a direct result of ellipsis, rather than constituting part of the licensing conditions on ellipsis.

I argue for a novel model of feature valuation in the CI interface and explore under what circumstances a syntactic feature is semantically interpretable. As the groundwork for the investigation, I propose an explicit Distributed Morphology model of Italian nouns of profession. The data provide evidence that the morphology accesses the narrow-syntax representation at two different temporal points within a phase: the earlier point (Spell-Out) returns a morphological realization faithful to feature values present in narrow syntax, while the later point (Transfer) allows for a narrow-syntax representation to be enriched by the CI component. Thus, there is no syntactic distinction between interpretable and uninterpretable features: a syntactic feature appears to be interpretable only if it has been licensed by the CI interface.

In studying the mechanisms that create portmanteaux, it is often difficult to distinguish structural constituency from linear adjacency. This paper examines the Irish verbal complex, the particular intricacies of which allow us to disentangle linear adjacency from morphosyntactic constituency. We observe that portmanteaux are formed between linearly adjacent nodes, without reference to structural constituency. A theory is developed in which Vocabulary Insertion operates over linearized structures, allowing Insertion of linearly adjacent nodes. This mechanism is termed ‘Stretching.’ In this way the characteristic slogan of Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993) “syntax all the way down” is maintained, but the relevant sense of syntax is one in which post-syntactic processing creates complex structures which imperfectly mirror the narrow syntax. Importantly, it is linear adjacency within these post-syntactic structures which regulates patterns of Vocabulary Insertion, not structural adjacency.

This is a study of Russian short first names (or ‘hypocoristics’) formed by a truncation of the corresponding full name. I propose that, syntactically, hypocoristics are associated with their own noun head that occupies a particular hierarchical position in a syntactic tree. This noun head is specified for the grammatical feature inflectional [class II]. Evidence comes from a change in the inflectional class of masculine first names, as only noun heads are capable of changing the grammatical features of a base. I also show that hypocoristics have morphological properties that are very similar to those of Russian truncated common nouns, which means that there is no need to posit a specific grammar of proper names, different from the grammar of common nouns. This work is an elaboration of my 2014 study The syntax of expressive suffixes in Russian. The research for the present paper was carried out based on the Distributed Morphology framework, which distinguishes between √roots and syntactic categories and thus provides formal tools for handling syntactic processes that take place within individual words—in this case, within Russian proper names.

Embick and Marantz (2008) present an analysis of the Danish definiteness alternation involving a postsyntactic rule of Local Dislocation (an operation sensitive to linear adjacency but not hierarchical structure). Examination of a fuller range of data reveals that the alternation cannot be determined strictly in terms of adjacency; rather, it depends on the structural relation between the D and the N. We propose to treat the alternation as an instance of conditioned allomorphy, the suffixal form appearing when D is sister to a minimal N, and the free article elsewhere. This alternation is, then, a case of “blocking” in the sense accepted by Embick and Marantz: the result of competition between Vocabulary items for the expression of a morpheme. Assuming that the condition for wordhood is being a complex head, we argue that the distinction between free and bound morphemes, and whether bound morphemes are prefixes or suffixes, must be encoded in the Vocabulary items spelling out the morphemes.

This article explores the implications of the distribution of tone sandhi domains in Yixing Chinese (a largely undescribed Wu variety) for the syntactic analysis of a type of compound, labelled a non-compositional compound (NCC). Various diagnostics identify these compounds as a well-defined type in Yixing, including non-compositional/idiomatic semantics and opacity in coreference and coordination. NCCs also undergo a particular tone sandhi process, Pattern Substitution (PS). These diagnostics, we show, suggest an analysis whereby NCCs are formed by Merging two uncategorised roots. The root Merge is symmetric, leading to questions of how the resulting structure is to be linearised and labelled. The linearisation, we suggest, is determined post-syntactically by an Encyclopedia entry imposing an order due to the diachronic reanalysis of a compositional structure. This Encyclopedia entry is also the source of the non-compositional semantics of these structures, permitted by the encyclopedic search (en-search) of Borer (2013a). Symmetric root Merge cannot yield a compositionally derived meaning, which we show follows from the theory of labelling of Chomsky (2013, 2015). Our account explains proposals by authors such as Arad (2003) and Borer (2013a), who stipulate that a first-categorisation domain receives non-compositional, atomic content. The paper also includes a preliminary description of the Yixing tonal system in general.

By examining ϕ-agreement in relative clauses, this paper investigates the relation between syntax and morphology in terms of the person feature. English relativized subjects appear to have different phi-features for the purposes of subject-verb agreement and binding relations. The verbal morphology uniformly displays 3rd person whereas reflexive binding shows 1st/2nd person in addition to 3rd person. If subject extraction must trigger an invariable verbal form as Ouhalla (1993) argues, the binding alternations cannot be accounted for. This paper proposes dual properties of the person feature based on Harley and Ritter’s (2002) feature geometry, and argues that relativized subjects may not obtain both properties of the person feature from the head noun via Agree. This partial agreement causes morphosyntactic variation in English and cross-linguistically in Distributed Morphology (DM). The current analysis demonstrates that referential and morphological (under)specifications are kept separate under the cons...

This article is an addendum to recent contributions on the structure of compounds in root-based frameworks, such as the Exoskeletal Model (Borer 2009, 2013a:chap. 6, 2013b) or Distributed Morphology (Harley 2009). It presents a subtype of Dutch primary compounds of which the nonhead is demonstrably a bare root. The nonhead of this type of compounding is fully acategorial. It does not contain categorial heads (i.e., little heads) and neither is it categorized otherwise. As such, the discussion substantiates the root hypothesis (Halle & Marantz 1993; Borer 2005a,b, 2013a) and supports the view that the root does not need to be licensed by superstructure in order to be interpretable or realizable (see Alexiadou & Lohndal 2013, pace Arad 2003, Marantz 2008, Ramchand 2008, Starke 2009).

This squib proposes a split approach to adjectival agreement in Modern Standard Arabic in the Distributed Morphology framework and adds to an ongoing debate in the morphosyntactic literature regarding the location of agreement in grammar (Adger & Harbour 2008; Polinsky 2016). Based on the distinctive distribution of gender/number features and definiteness/case features on attributive and predicative adjectives, I argue that gender and number features are agreement features that are manipulated in the syntax through Bidirectional Agree (Baker 2008; Baier 2015) while definiteness and case features are concord features shared through Morphological Feature Copying and AGR node insertion at PF (Norris 2014). In further discussion of case features, I show that case features may be valued either at PF for attributive adjectives, like definiteness features, or in the syntax via case assignment for predicative adjectives. As such, the analysis predicts the distribution of gender, number, definiteness, and case features on both predicative and attributive adjectives in Modern Standard Arabic. In doing so, it provides novel evidence in support for the division of agreement and concord features in language derivation.

In late-insertion, realizational models of morphology such as Distributed Morphology (DM), the insertion of Vocabulary Items (VIs) is conditioned by cyclic operations in the syntax. This paper explores whether an isomorphic relationship can be established between cyclic operations such as phases and prosodic domains. In the spirit of D’Alessandro and Scheer’s (2015) proposal of a Modular Phase Impenetrability Condition (MPIC), we strive to provide an analysis in which prosodic boundaries in even smaller, word-level-like syntactic structures—the ‘lexical domain’—can be identified solely within the syntax. We propose a DM-account for the distribution of nominal plural exponency in German, which reveals a dominant trend for a trochaic-foot structure for all but -s-plural exponents (Wiese 2001, 2009). Inspired by Gouskova’s (2019) and Svenonius’ (2016) work concerning the prosody–morphology interface, we argue that the index of a Prosodic Word ω in non-s-plurals is associated with a specific feature configuration. We propose that only a n[+pl(ural)] configuration, in which the nominalizing head n hosts the SynSem-feature Num(ber)[+pl(ural)], rather than a general cyclic categorizing phase head such as n, indexes a Prosodic Word ω for nominal plural exponents in (Standard) German. Based on this empirical evidence from German plural exponency, we argue that (i) prosodic boundaries can be established directly by syntactic structures, (ii) these prosodic boundaries condition VI insertion during the initial stages of Spell-Out, and (iii) prosodic domains are based on individual languages’ syntactic structures and feature configurations, and are thus relativized and language-specific in nature.

Numeral phrases in Standard Arabic are known for gender and number mismatches between the numeral and the enumerated noun. This article reduces these mismatches to two morphological deletion rules. The first deletes the feminine morpheme of the numeral when the enumerated noun is feminine, and the second deletes the plural morpheme of the enumerated noun when the numeral carries a plural morpheme. The first rule is further restricted to deleting only feminine morphemes that are underlyingly part of the numeral, and not inherited via agreement with a feminine enumerated noun via a syntactic agreement process. The analysis in this article is consistent with Sadiqi’s (2006) claim that the feminine form in Arabic is the basic one from which the masculine was derived historically by reducing the feminine form. The deletion analysis here also finds support from Chomsky’s approach of deriving the masculine from the feminine as theoretically less costly and more explanatorily adequate. Resume: Il est bien connu que les syntagmes numeraux en arabe standard peuvent attester l’absence de l’accord en genre et en nombre entre le numeral et la tete nominale. Cet article reduit ce non-accord a deux regles morphologiques de suppression. La premiere supprime le morpheme du feminin du numeral quand le nom est feminin. La seconde supprime le morpheme du pluriel du nom quand le numeral porte un morpheme du pluriel. La premiere regle s’applique seulement aux morphemes qui font partie du numeral en une forme sous-jacente; elle ne s’applique pas a des morphemes qui resultent de l’accord syntaxique avec un nom. L’analyse soutenue dans cet article est compatible avec la proposition de Sadiqi (2006), qui voudrait que la forme feminine en arabe soit la forme de base et que la forme masculine soit derivee diachroniquement par la reduction de la forme feminine. L’analyse presentee ici est egalement appuyee par l’approche de Chomsky, selon laquelle la forme masculine est derivee de la forme feminine, dans la mesure ou cette analyse est plus simple de point de vue theorique et qu’elle atteint un niveau superieur d’adequation explicative.

Case assignment and argument licensing in process nominals, that is, nouns such as destruction that are morphologically related to verbs, are assumed to operate in a verblike manner both within government-and-binding theory and, more recently, within the distributed morphology framework. The data from Russian challenge this approach and reveal that there is an important difference between the verbal and the nominal domains: case assignment in verbs is sensitive to the underlying argument structure, but in nominals to surface structure, that is, the collection of overt arguments. We propose a hierarchy of case-assignment rules that applies in the nominal domain. Moreover, within the nominal domain, case assignment is uniform: the same rules apply to different types of nominals, including prototypical process nominals and relational nouns. The main theoretical advantage of our lexicalist, constraint-based approach is that it can capture similarities between the verbal and the nominal domains, seen in the assignment of inherent and lexical cases, but also in their fundamental differences.

In Cypriot Greek, the negated future is marked by the element tha, which appears instead of the expected present tense copula and a selected subordinating element. This paper documents the distribution of this item for the first time, and presents an analysis in Distributed Morphology that analyzes tha as a portmanteau morpheme realizing two heads in the context of negation. This analysis requires that spans (or targets of Fusion) can include a verb and the head of its C complement.

The present paper proposes a morphological lowering analysis for the structure associated with alethic ACQ, a postverbal morpheme capable of denoting the modality of ability and possibility in Chinese as well as many Southeast Asian languages. Built in the framework of distributed morphology, we suggest that ACQ is base-generated in a preverbal node as a modal element and lowers to a postverbal position during its derivation on the PF branch. We compare and contrast the proposed lowering account with the other model of analysis, the raising analysis, and demonstrate that the lowering account is superior both conceptually and empirically.

Despite the apparently identical surface realization of their verbalizing element, the Sino-Korean verbs suffixed with -ha ‘do’ correspond to two quite distinct syntactic structures, with attendant consequences for case marking, clause typing, compatibility with progressive aspect, and adverb modification. The verbalizers associated with native Korean roots exhibit the same contrasts, with the only difference being their phonological realization. I argue that a fine-grained classification of v (Harley, 1995, 2002; Folli and Harley, 2005, 2007), combined with the major assumption of Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz, 1993) that the spell-out of a functional morpheme is determined in reference to its syntactic context, captures the morphological, syntactic, and semantic behaviors of Korean verbalizers in a principled way.

Plural morphemes are conventionally analyzed as realizations of Num-(ber). However, much recent research has investigated idiosyncratic/‘‘lexical’’ plural systems where some or all of the plural morphemes are realizations of some other syntactic head. The focus of this article is the intricate plural system of Amharic (Ethiosemitic), where there is considerable evidence that plural morphology is split between two heads: Num and the nominalizing head n. The article thus provides further empirical evidence that the morphosyntax of plurality does not involve Num alone; it also develops a novel analysis of a plural system that relies on two different morphosyntactic heads.