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‘The Syntax-Phonology Interface’ presents a theory of how syntax, phonology, and morphology interact in a cyclic manner, based on the Lexical Phonology, Derivation by Phase and Distributed Morphology frameworks. Phenomena discussed include cyclic spell-out and the Phase Impenetrability Condition, locality restrictions in morphology and phonology, lexical and post-lexical rules, and the prosodic hierarchy.

This chapter presents the central assumptions about Agree and Distributed Morphology adopted in this study. These assumptions are sufficient to account for absence of Principle B effects, i.e., the observation that in many languages pronouns take over anaphoric duties when a dedicated anaphor is lacking. An account of this generalization is developed in terms of the Elsewhere principle. More specifically, it is shown that the framework of Distributed Morphology framework allows for a precise formal analysis of a wide array of data conforming to this generalization, including the diachrony of English, Haitian Creole, and the delay of Principle B effects in L1 acquisition.

This chapter considers two questions that many people ask themselves (or should ask themselves). What is actually the difference between Nanosyntax (NS, Starke, 2009) and Distributed Morphology (DM, Halle and Marantz, 1993)? And which one of them is right? These questions remain as important now as they were some 15 years ago, when Michal Starke introduced the basics of the NS theory. Despite the fact that several written sources on NS have been available since 2007, there is still a lot of confusion about what NS actually is, and how NS and DM compare to each other. The present paper is an attempt to clear things up.

This chapter proposes a theory of allomorphic locality centered on the interaction of cyclic and linear locality domains: a piece-based, syntactic theory of morphology known as Distributed Morphology. It examines the locality of allomorphy question and how morphological effects are determined in a system that has cyclic derivation, structural (that is, hierarchical) relations determined by the syntax, and linear relations derived from the hierarchical structure (hypothetically, in the PF component of the grammar). In Distributed Morphology, complex expressions arise from discrete pieces (morphemes), with the composition of morphemes taking place in the syntax (or in terms of relations derived from syntactic structures).

One of Morris Halle's many lasting contributions to the study of morphology is his elaboration of a principled relationship between morphology and syntax. In particular, his work in Distributed Morphology argues that syntactic nodes provide the domains within which morphological disjunctivity obtains. This chapter demonstrates that an elusive interaction in Georgian inflection can be elegantly captured under a Distributed Morphology analysis that combines Halle's theory of fission with Béjar's theory of Agree. The interaction in question is the disjunctivity among number-agreement suffixes on Georgian verbs.

This chapter explores the conditioning of allomorphy in Optimal Construction Morphology (OCM; Caballero & Inkelas 2013), a highly lexicalist theory of morphology. OCM differs from other lexicalist theories (e.g. Lexical Morphology and Phonology; Kiparsky 1982) in having both top-down and bottom-up design features. OCM’s unique architecture generates novel predictions regarding the directionality and locality of conditioning of morphological operations. OCM predicts that allomorphy which is conditioned by arbitrary lexical properties of other morphs in the same word will exhibit an inside-out and potentially local character, whereas allomorphy which is conditioned by properties of the meaning of the word is subject to neither directionality nor locality considerations. This asymmetry arises from the fundamental claim in OCM that word formation is driven by an abstract meaning target, and is illustrated with case studies from Nanti, Nimboran, and Totonac.

Recent morphological theories have highlighted two very different views of what roots are. Within Distributed Morphology, roots are the basic meaningful lexical units of language. Within autonomous morphology, where the meaningful lexical units are lexemes, roots play a very different role and their necessary meaningfulness has been called into question (Aronoff 1976, 1994, 2007). In this article, I will provide detailed evidence from English irregular verbs that roots are purely morphological entities and that English verb roots cannot be meaningful. I will then trace the history of the study of roots in Semitic grammar, beginning with the earliest Arabic grammarians and moving on to the early Hebrew grammatical tradition. I will show that, although traditional Arabic grammar dealt with roots, it was the Hebrew grammarians who gave roots the special status that they acquired in Western grammatical description from the Renaissance on. I will finally review evidence from inside and outside formal linguistics on the status of roots in modern Semitic languages and conclude that, although much points to the reality of roots in these languages, there is little or no evidence that these roots are meaningful as opposed to purely morphological entities. This calls into question the basis of Distributed Morphology, or any theory that relies on meaningful roots as fundamental theoretical entities.

This chapter sketches the theory of morphology to illustrate how reduplication fits into a general theory of word formation. The general framework is Distributed Morphology. The discussions cover readjustment, juncture insertion as a variety of readjustment, Klamath distributive and intensive duplication, and evidence for readjustment.

This chapter provides a survey of approaches that have been taken to ME. It treats in some detail discussion of the Elsewhere Condition, fission, reduplication, multiple functional heads, and other devices proposed to prevent ME in environments where it is not found, while allowing it where it does occur. Included are discussions of ME in Paradigm Function Morphology and other word-and-paradigm approaches, Distributed Morphology, and Optimality Theory, among others. It is observed that most discussions have focused on a small number of similar examples, and it is suggested that it may be impossible to find a single approach to account for all examples.

This chapter introduces the major themes of the book. It begins with some basic definitions of gender, natural gender, and arbitrary gender, and then places the book in the context of previous research. The main proposals of the book are laid out: gender is on the nominalizing head n, natural gender is interpretable whereas arbitrary gender is uninterpretable, and these assumptions allow for a typology of two- to three-gender systems. The chapter also provides background on the frameworks adopted in the book (Minimalism and Distributed Morphology), and limitatations in scope are clearly identified (e.g. the book does not focus on the mechanisms of gender agreement). The chapter concludes with a preview of the remaining content of the book, organized as chapter summaries.

This book investigates whether morphology is computed in the same system as phonology or whether morphology and phonology are computed by distinct linguistic systems, organized serially in such a way that potential interactions are restricted. Morphological operations, especially those responsible for allomorphy, are limited not only by the cyclic organization of the grammar but also by the local domains defined by syntax and syntactic relations. The derivational properties of this approach thus strongly restrict potential interactions between morphosyntax and morphophonology. The book considers the debate between derivational and nonderivational theories by looking at allomorphy in natural language and describes the opposing theoretical positions in terms of localism versus globalism and serialism versus parallelism. It also articulates a localist theory of contextual allomorphy, a version of Distributed Morphology which posits that patterns of contextual allomorphy are constrained by both phase-cyclic and linear notions of locality.

This chapter first presents the key issues of discussion concerning the causative alternation, before proceeding to outline the theory of Voice that is further built on and developed in the rest of the book. The chapter first defines the causative alternation and offer a survey of the issues that have widely been discussed in the literature. It then turns to the introduction of the main hypothesis, according to which the causative alternation is a Voice alternation. It offers the ingredients of the model of Voice that is developed in this book, building on Kratzer (1996) and on work within Distributed Morphology. It develops a theory of Voice, according to which next to active there are three non-active Voice heads involved in transitivity alternations: Passive, Middle, and expletive Voice. The chapter finally provides an outline of the book.

Within the intermodular perspective of Distributed Morphology, various authors have raised the question of how the domains (e.g., cycles, phases) of one module (syntax, morphology, semantics) interact with those of others. This chapter explores one small aspect of this puzzle. Specifically, it proposes a general rubric that allows for some slippage in otherwise well-established locality domains—cases in which a well-motivated cyclic domain appears to be suspended, allowing dependencies to span a larger structure than they normally may. To the extent that this is on the right track, the chapter bolsters arguments that cyclic domains constrain the locality of operations across modules and thus constitute a deep property of grammar.

This chapter develops Distributed Morphology analysis of the various past perfective forms in Catalan and this shows that the late insertion of functional material together with the syntactic structures proposed explains a surface morphosyntactic mismatch, and accounts for the partial syncretism between lexical and functional anar. The proposal of an abstract motion f-morpheme solves a long-standing debate on the exotic status of a go-past auxiliary in Catalan, which, this chapter claims, can account for all instances of anar. More generally, this chapter's analysis offers a new approach to the status of lexical roots that compete for insertion into f-morphemes that could be extended to other languages where go and similar roots have both lexical and functional uses.

This chapter compares two different positions with respect to the relevance of structure in terms of stress assignment in English derived words: the “classic derivational” and the optimality theory (OT) approach. The central issue is how to account for the preservation of stress (and vowel quality) in English affixation and whether the structure of derived words plays any role in the process. The first view presented in this chapter is couched in the framework of Distributed Morphology.

This chapter offers a treatment for two types of colloquial and evaluative truncated nominal forms (TNFs) in Brazilian Portuguese within the framework of Distributed Morphology. It compares the different types of TNFs under treatment and aims to answer the following questions: (a) What is the nature of the word-formation process that generates TNFs? (b) What is their structural representation? A description of the phenomenon is presented and its evaluative interpretation is explained. It is suggested that this interpretation is the result of the presence of an evaluative morpheme, namely [EVAL], in their morphosyntactic structure. This head is responsible for producing the apparent truncation effect observed in the relevant data. In addition, the idiosyncratic features of form-class II in the evaluative head [EVAL] in the structure of the TNF force its form-class morpheme to be realized as –a, –as, or –is without copying the same ending from the corresponding full form.

This chapter has two goals, both concerning the implications of gender features on n. First, nominals that contain multiple, stacked ns are investigated. Data is presented showing that the highest n determines the gender of the nominal, and the chapter develops an explanation of this fact based on independently-motivated assumptions about morphosyntactic cyclicity. Interestingly, some diminutive nouns retain the gender of their base noun, and the chapter shows how this can be explained given current approaches to diminutive morphosyntax. The second goal of the chapter is to consider declension class, which is often inserted post-syntactically at/near n in Distributed Morphology. It is demonstrated that gender can affect the choice of declension class—as predicted if it is adjoined to n and gender is on n. The chapter presents a brief case study of declension class in Spanish, which further articulates the relationship between gender and declension class.