Speaker: Isa Kerem Bayirli
Title: Impossible Syntactic Representations = Impossible Morphological Expressions?
Date/Time: Thursday, Nov 15, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32D-461
In this talk, I will argue that previous approaches to suffixhood in the inflectional domain, both in their lexicalist (Lieber, 1980 i.a. ) and syntactic (Ouhalla, 1991 i.a.) variants, fail to capture a pattern that emerges upon closer inspection. The pattern in question is this:
V-X Generalization
A morpheme that categorically selects for a verbal item is always a suffix on this verbal item.An approach that takes suffixhood to be lexically idiosyncratic information treats this as an accident – an unsatisfying conclusion.
My second claim will be that this observation is correlated with a restriction on what kind of behavior verbal items can show:
A Restriction on the Behavior of Verbal Items
Projections headed by verbal items cannot show phrasal behavior (i.e. movement to a spec position and coordination).The challenge posed by the English language to these claims will be argued to arise from the fact that what has been taken to be bare `VP` in English is actually a projection headed by an infinitival projection, for which independent evidence is presented.
The correlation between the generalization and the restriction given above will be formed as a causal relation, using an non-lexicalist implementation of Brody`s (2003) Mirror Theory.
All in all, we will end up having impossible morphological facts arising from an impossible syntactic representation. This adds a new dimension to debates on the exact relation between syntax and morphology.