Pavel Caha and Marina Pantcheva
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- April 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780190931247
- eISBN:
- 9780190931285
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190931247.003.0002
- Subject:
- Linguistics, Syntax and Morphology
At a general level, Chapter 1 is concerned with the categorization of expressions in natural languages. The authors approach this question with a relatively new tool in hand: phrasal spellout (Starke ...
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At a general level, Chapter 1 is concerned with the categorization of expressions in natural languages. The authors approach this question with a relatively new tool in hand: phrasal spellout (Starke 2009). If phrasal spellout exists, a single item may correspond to several terminals, where each terminal has a distinct label. As a consequence, the approach predicts the existence of expressions whose behavior corresponds to a mixture of prototypical categorical properties. The chapter applies this relatively new analytical option to locative markers in Shona and Luganda. It contrasts them with more familiar Indo-European adpositions, in order to show that their behavior is distinct from ordinary adpositions and other word classes. The behavior of the new class, however, is not explained by positing a new category in the decomposed projection, but by proposing that it corresponds to a combination of several existing categories.Less
At a general level, Chapter 1 is concerned with the categorization of expressions in natural languages. The authors approach this question with a relatively new tool in hand: phrasal spellout (Starke 2009). If phrasal spellout exists, a single item may correspond to several terminals, where each terminal has a distinct label. As a consequence, the approach predicts the existence of expressions whose behavior corresponds to a mixture of prototypical categorical properties. The chapter applies this relatively new analytical option to locative markers in Shona and Luganda. It contrasts them with more familiar Indo-European adpositions, in order to show that their behavior is distinct from ordinary adpositions and other word classes. The behavior of the new class, however, is not explained by positing a new category in the decomposed projection, but by proposing that it corresponds to a combination of several existing categories.
Víctor Acedo-Matellán
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198733287
- eISBN:
- 9780191797804
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198733287.003.0003
- Subject:
- Linguistics, Syntax and Morphology, Theoretical Linguistics
The theory of the syntax-morphology interface is based on Distributed Morphology (Embick and Noyer). The morphological dimension of linguistic expressions is construed on the basis of a previously ...
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The theory of the syntax-morphology interface is based on Distributed Morphology (Embick and Noyer). The morphological dimension of linguistic expressions is construed on the basis of a previously built syntactic representation and these two representations are, by default, isomorphic. Syntax/morphology mismatches are due to operations mapping the syntactic representation to the PF representation. This mapping is also responsible for cross-linguistic variation, the mapping from syntax to LF being by hypothesis universally uniform. An operation of Morphological Merger creates complex words out of terminals. Morphological Merger is free, its results being filtered by the Vocabulary Items that realize the terminal nodes of the representation. If the contextual conditions established for the insertion of a given Vocabulary Item are not met, that can lead, in certain languages, to a failure of PF interpretation. The crashing character of the theory is shared with Nanosyntax (Fábregas).Less
The theory of the syntax-morphology interface is based on Distributed Morphology (Embick and Noyer). The morphological dimension of linguistic expressions is construed on the basis of a previously built syntactic representation and these two representations are, by default, isomorphic. Syntax/morphology mismatches are due to operations mapping the syntactic representation to the PF representation. This mapping is also responsible for cross-linguistic variation, the mapping from syntax to LF being by hypothesis universally uniform. An operation of Morphological Merger creates complex words out of terminals. Morphological Merger is free, its results being filtered by the Vocabulary Items that realize the terminal nodes of the representation. If the contextual conditions established for the insertion of a given Vocabulary Item are not met, that can lead, in certain languages, to a failure of PF interpretation. The crashing character of the theory is shared with Nanosyntax (Fábregas).
