Speaker: Ksenia Ershova (MIT)
Title: What’s in a (polysynthetic) phase: Dynamic domains, spellout and locality
Time: Thursday, December 7th, 12:30pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: INTRODUCTION
This talk demonstrates how languages with complex morphology (=polysynthetic languages) can help tease apart rules which apply purely in the syntax from interface conditions which determine how linguistic structure is pronounced. The two types of rules nontrivially interact with each other, making it difficult to determine the division of labor in languages like English, which don’t make use of complex morphology. The results of the study highlight the importance of understudied, typologically diverse languages for our understanding of human linguistic competence.
ABSTRACT Since Chomsky (2000), constraints on locality have been defined in terms of phasehood. One explanation for the opaqueness of phases for syntactic operations has been to treat them as potential goals and, correspondingly, interveners for Agree with elements inside the phase (Rackowski and Richards 2005, etc.). On the other side, a broad consensus has been to connect phasehood to the timing of spell-out: syntactic structure is sent to PF cyclically, and a constituent which has been spelled out is no longer visible for higher syntactic derivations (Uriagereka 1999, Chomsky 2001, 2008, etc.). Building on this intuition, a number of approaches have identified phases as salient domains for defining prosodic rules (e.g. Newell 2008, Dobashi 2013).
Based on data from West Circassian, I argue for an integrated theory of phasehood which combines both approaches. West Circassian provides evidence for the existence of two partially overlapping, but independent notions of syntactic domain: (i) spellout domains which are relevant for defining rules of syntax-to-prosody mapping, and (ii) locality domains, which serve as interveners for Agree. The two types of domains display different properties: prosodic domains are spelled out wholesale, together with the head and the edge of the constituent, while locality domains are equidistant to higher probes with their edge, allowing for successive-cyclic movement out of them. Both types of domains are dynamic (cf. den Dikken 2007; Gallego 2010; Bošković 2014), but in different ways and under distinct conditions. Prosodic domains are defined by the boundaries of the extended projection: for example, an NP behaves as a prosodic constituent even in the absence of D. The opaqueness of locality domains, on the other hand, is relativized to a given probe – if the probe has independently agreed with the head of a locality domain, the corresponding domain no longer displays phasehood properties in relation to that probe.
As a polysynthetic language, West Circassian provides a unique window into the dichotomy between the two types of syntactic domains due to the parameters which derive its complex morphology. In the domain of syntax-to-prosody mapping, polysynthetic languages allow for systematic mismatches between syntactic and prosodic phrasing (e.g. Compton and Pittman 2010; Barrie and Mathieu 2016) – certain phrases correspond to phonological words and are thus identifiable as prosodic domains. The sensitivity of locality domains to Agree is observable due to obligatory agreement between heads of the same extended projection, which, among other things, drives concatenation of verbal heads to form complex wordforms – in certain well-defined configurations, this agreement renders locality domains transparent for probing, thus confirming Agree-based approaches to phasehood.
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