160129 PS Introductory Seminar on Morphology (2014W)

The lectures will examine the theory of Distributed Morphology via a thorough application of it to a broad but coherent domain of facts, in Arregi and Nevin's 2011 study of the Basque Clitic/Aux/C system, including dialects. The first meeting will consist of an introduction to DM through two of its classic papers. Most of the rest of the meetings will focus on the Arregi and Nevins model, which posits 6 post-syntactic pre-phonological modules, arranged in a serial pipe from Syntax to Phonology. We will bear in mind two questions throughout. First, can the interactions of different rules (bleeding, feeding, etc.,) be attributed to their membership in different modules? And second, can the membership of a rule in a module be predicted from what the rule does?