The Status of Kanien’kéha Noun Incorporation

Words in their place. Festchrift for JL Mackenzie, …, 2004

Texas Linguistic Society IX: The Morphosyntax …, 2007

Lingua, 2014

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

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

Yearbook of morphology, 1990

This paper offers the initial design for a functional theory of morphology and addresses the question of how much unification or separation of domains and units is required in such a theory. Given that morphology is largely driven by principles that also rule syntax and semantics, the main thrust of this proposal is that the interaction between morphology and other areas of the theory can be adequately accounted for by the combination of three descriptive-explanatory resources: layered structures, templates and constructions. Other descriptive-explanatory principles such as feature perlocation and the characteristics of bases and adjuncts remain specifically morphological. Unification and separation in morphology must be carried out on functional grounds. Morevoer, Old English evidence shows that no strict separation can be postulated, either between morphology and the rest of the theory or among the different morphological processes.

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

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.