Beware Occam’s Syntactic Razor: Morphotactic Analysis and Spanish Mesoclisis

Arregi, Karlos; Nevins, Andrew

doi:10.1162/ling_a_00286

Cited by 16 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…Since rules such as this one are always a repair triggered by a constraint (Arregi & Nevins ), crossdialectal variation in how the violation is repaired is expected. There is no such variation in Wolof: oon is always stranded when the verb with negation is in C.…”

Section: Feeding and Bleeding Between Head Movement And Lowering In Wmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interleaving Syntax and Postsyntax: Spellout before Syntactic Movement

Martinović

2019

Syntax

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This article explores the proposal that a phase can be at least partially spelled out and then subsequently accessed by heads from a higher phase. I provide morphological evidence for this claim, by looking at examples in which a morphological (i.e., postsyntactic) process feeds a later narrowly syntactic one. Main evidence comes from the interaction between syntactic head movement and postsyntactic affixation in the Niger-Congo language Wolof, which confirms an important prediction of the analysis. Namely, if a postsyntactic process can feed a syntactic one, we also expect the postsyntactic process to be bled if the structural conditions for its application are not met, resulting in surface opacity effects. This is precisely what we find in Wolof, where the past-tense morpheme oon is postsyntactically affixed onto the verb in a particular structural configuration and carried along with it to C but is stranded by the verb below C if the structural requirements for its affixation are not met.I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to Karlos Arregi and Gereon M€ uller for their comments and suggestions on various versions of this article. I also thank Jonathan Bobaljik; Klaus Abels; three anonymous reviewers of Syntax; and the students and faculty of the linguistics departments 1 Abbreviations used in this article: ACC = accusative, ACCOMPL = accomplishment, AOR = aorist, ASP = aspect, DIST = distal, F = feminine, HAB = habitual, IPFV = imperfective, LOC = locative clitic, NEG = negation, OBJ = object clitic, PFV = perfective, PL = plural, PROX = proximal, PST = past tense, SBJ = subject clitic, SG = singular. 2 The glide w is inserted between two vowels in Wolof, as hiatus is not allowed. Oon therefore always surfaces as woon when the preceding element ends in a vowel.Interleaving Syntax and Postsyntax 379

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Section: Feeding and Bleeding Between Head Movement And Lowering In Wmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interleaving Syntax and Postsyntax: Spellout before Syntactic Movement

Martinović

2019

Syntax

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“…The phenomena illustrated in (2) and (3) have been studied by different scholars within the Generative framework. In this section, I focus on Arregi & Nevins' (2018) post-syntactic approach (henceforth: A&N2018) and Manzini & Savoia's (2011) syntactic approach (henceforth: M&S2011).…”

Section: Approaches To Unexpected Agreementmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As these examples show, agreement morphology can appear both in its prototypical position and after the clitic, as in (2) [doubling], or only after the clitic, as in (3) [displacement]. This phenomenon has been studied by Harris (1995); Harris & Halle (2005); 2010); Alcazar & Saltarelli (2010); Manzini & Savoia (2011); Arregi & Nevins (2018); among others. All these studies have focused on the doubling and displacement of -n with second person plural imperatives.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…In some varieties (i.e. Latin American varieties and some southern Iberian varieties, as well as Canarian Spanish), the morpheme -n corresponds both to the 2pl (ustedes canta-n 'You pl sing'), and to the 3pl (Ellos canta-n 'They sing').4 Some of the proposals also mention the existence of unexpected agreement with infinitives (hacer-lo-n) and gerunds (haciendo-lo-n) Arregi & Nevins (2018). also include unexpected agreement with the first person plural (haga-mos-lo-n).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Unexpected agreement in Spanish revisited

Mare

2018

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Verbal agreement in Spanish is materialized as the rightmost morpheme on a verb. When enclitics attach, the expected order is: verbal base + agr(eement) + cl(itic): hága-n agr-lo cl 'Do it!'. Nevertheless, in non-standard Spanish, verbal agreement can appear at the right of the clitic, giving rise to what has been named unexpected agreement: haga-n agr-lo cl-n agr or haga-lo cl-n agr 'Do it!'. This squib discusses different data related to unexpected agreement in order to provide some generalizations which previous approaches to this topic fail to address. So as to revisit the operations involved in this broad phenomenon, it is pivotal to make a distinction between unexpected exponents and unexpected locus.

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“…In many languages, certain diagnostics either do not apply or yield contradictory results. Also, there might be other language‐specific processes, such as prosodically conditioned reordering rules of the type discussed in Harris & Halle , Arregi & Nevins , Salzmann , and Arregi & Nevins , that might make a distinction impossible or even undesirable in a given language. Crucially, for the purposes of this article, I am arguing that neither case affixes nor clitics are per se a problem for the SOCIC generalization, since we have evidence that even with affixes there is a case marker present underlyingly on the nonfinal conjunct.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Symmetry of Case in Conjunction

Weisser

2019

Syntax

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In this article, I argue that all of the conjuncts in nominal conjunction always bear the same case. Apparent counterexamples, where conjuncts seem to differ in morphological case marking, are due either to a misanalysis of the underlying syntactic structure or to superficial morphological processes that create the impression of a difference in case marking. Once we control for phenomena of this sort (namely &P clitics, suspended affixation, and allomorphy), we find that case marking in nominal conjunction is always symmetric. This finding is in stark contrast to the phenomenon of ϕ agreement, which is known to exhibit asymmetries in conjunction. I show that the Chomskyan account of case assignment, according to which case arises only as a reflex of ϕ agreement, cannot account for this mismatch without stipulative assumptions. The pattern follows straightforwardly, however, if we assume that case assignment proceeds on the basis of syntactic structure while ϕ agreement can be either syntactic or postsyntactic. Finally, I show that the generalization established can be used as a simple diagnostic to distinguish syntactic case-marking alternations from morphological ones.

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Beware Occam’s Syntactic Razor: Morphotactic Analysis and Spanish Mesoclisis

Cited by 16 publications

References 35 publications

Interleaving Syntax and Postsyntax: Spellout before Syntactic Movement

Interleaving Syntax and Postsyntax: Spellout before Syntactic Movement

Unexpected agreement in Spanish revisited

On the Symmetry of Case in Conjunction

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