160209 VO Theory of Morphology (2009W)

The lecture will first flesh out the lines of argument in my recent paper "How Much should We Distribute Morphology?" Its main theme is that there is no reason to retain any specifically "morphological" entities or principles in grammatical theory, either in phonology or syntax. Rather, a syntactic principle of Alternative Realization, ("AR") an extension of Halle and Marantz's (1993) "Merger", describes and determines distributions of bound morphemes as well as of many closed class free morphemes.
Subsequent lectures will show that the principle of AR developed earlier of the course plays a central role in what is traditionally thought of as clausal and/or local syntax. It is thus arguably a principle of Universal Grammar, in particular governing the lexicon/grammar interface, rather than part of some separate Morphological Component. This course can be tailored for undergraduate or graduate students. Here are the main topics in the order they will be covered:

Topic 1: Language-particular stress contours as determining morpheme and word order.
Review of previous candidates for specifically morphological principles and categories.
Revised principles of morpheme order and word order, and the placement of heads.

Topic 2: Merger and fusion (Halle-Marantz) as both "upward" and "downward" processes.
English affix movement and other English inflections.
Applicative constructions in Bantu, Chinese and Indonesian; English indirect objects.

Topic 3: The relation between morphological Merger and syntactic Merge.
A comparison of the two procedures in several constructions; verb raising, "I to C"
Cross-linguistic examination of contrasting cases.

Topic 4: Alternative Realization as Generalized Merger in PF.
Differences in subject-verb agreement between English and Czech.
The extensive agreement within Czech DPs; the more limited agreement in Romance.

Topic 5: Formal specification of vocabulary items.
The redundancy of syntactic "feature copying".
The syntactic nature of impoverishment in Embick and Noyer (2001).
Expressing contrasting properties of different types of coordinate conjunctions.

Topic 6: PF Merge of Romance clitics.
The "Syntacticon" of grammatical lexical items as developed in Emonds (200, Chs. 3-4)
Syntactic vs. phonological addressing; paradigms as single vocabulary items.

Topic 7: PF Merge of free morphemes.
The history of do-support in generative grammar.
The English finite be paradigm,
Case-marking Prepositions lacking intrinsic semantics.
How to exclude "double-filled COMP."