Seemingly non-local phonological operations triggered by inflectional exponents have been observed in a number of languages. Focussing on de-spirantization in Barwar Aramaic, accent shift in Lithuanian, ni-insertion in Quechua, ruki rule application in Sanskrit, and vowel harmony in Kazakh, we argue that these phenomena should be analyzed as strictly local phonological reflexes of movement in a pre-syntactic autonomous morphological component. Such morphological movement is shown to arise without further assumptions under the approach to inflectional morphology based on Harmonic Serialism (McCarthy 2016) developed in Müller 2020. Here, each morphological operation immediately gives rise to an optimization procedure, morphological structure-building is subject to simple alignment constraints, and counter-cyclic operations are precluded. Against this background, phonological reflexes of movement are predicted to show up when a potentially complete word triggers a phonological cycle, which is then followed by morphological movement. Finally, we argue that constraint-driven morphological movement is superior to alternative accounts based on (i) non-local phonology, (ii) base-derivative faithfulness, (iii) phonological movement, (iv) counter-cyclic operations (interfixation, lowering, local dislocation), (v) syntactic movement, and (vi) strata.
On the basis of original data from Moksha Mordvin (Finno‐Ugric), I argue that some languages have nominal concord even though modifiers of the noun generally do not show inflection. Evidence for the presence of concord comes from nominal ellipsis, under which inflection is phonologically realized and restricted in the same way as regular nominal concord. To account for the distribution of concord exponents, I develop a model that allows features to be present in syntax but avoid realization. In particular, I propose that (i) Spellout applies to a node as soon as its Merge and Agree features are satisfied and (ii) Agree features are by default illegible at PF and need to undergo an operation called Probe Conversion in order to become accessible to PF processes. The distribution of features then follows from the relative timing of Spellout and Probe Conversion.
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