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An Introduction to Nanosyntax Received July 23, 2018; Accepted February 5, 2019

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An Introduction to Nanosyntax Received July 23, 2018; Accepted February 5, 2019 Linguistics Vanguard 2019; 20180045 Knut Tarald Taraldsen* An introduction to Nanosyntax https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2018-0045 Received July 23, 2018; accepted February 5, 2019 Abstract: This article provides an introduction to Nanosyntax – an approach to the syntax/lexicon interac- tion originating from work by Michal Starke. I present some of the motivation for allowing lexical items to replace whole phrases rather than only terminal elements, present the basic principles taken to govern the lexicalization procedure and show how syncretism patterns are handled in Nanosyntax. Keywords: the syntax/lexicon relation; phrasal lexicalization; nanosyntax 1 Overview This short article is intended to provide an introduction to Nanosyntax (NS) – an approach to the syntax/lexicon interaction that is perhaps best known for assuming that a single morpheme (lexical item) lexicalizes, i.e. replaces, a syntactic phrase as opposed to just a single terminal (syntactic head). The next six sections aim at presenting the basic motivation for NS and at familiarizing the reader with some central assumptions about the nature of lexical insertion.¹ For space reasons, the important topic of spell-out driven movement (Pantcheva 2011; Starke 2018) is only alluded to in passing. The Envoi offers a puzzle for the interested reader to try her teeth on. 2 The smallest building blocks of syntactic structures Chances are a linguistics student will at some point be told that lexical items (words or morphemes) are the minimal building blocks of syntactic structures. This means that lexical items are uniquely associated with the terminal nodes (X0-constituents or “heads”) of the tree representation of a syntactic structure. This view is the mainstream view and is adopted whether one thinks that inflected forms, e.g. boys, are formed in a morphological component before they are used to build syntactic structures (the lexicalist posi- tion) or formed in the syntax by associating boy and s with two adjacent syntactic terminals, e.g. N0 and Number0. It is also adopted in theories such as Distributed Morphology (DM) that take the sound bits of mor- phemes (i.e. the “vocabulary items” of DM) to be introduced to spell out syntactic terminals by replacing a set of syntactic features only after all syntactic operations have applied (“post-syntactic/late lexical insertion”). However, there are cases where a single morpheme seems to spell out more than just a single terminal. Consider, for example, the fact that the plural form of man is men. On the basis of boy/boys and similar pairs, many linguists (in particular, adherents of DM) would claim that there are two separate syntactic terminals, e.g. N0 and Num0, one spelled out by a noun and the other by s (if associated with the feature [plural]), i.e. N0 ! boy, Num0 ! s. But then, what about men, which looks like a single non-decomposable morpheme? This is a problem for any theory holding that morphemes stand in a one-to-one correspondence to syn- tactic terminals. But of course there are proposals as to how one may get around it. Here, I will only consider the most explicit recent proposals, i.e. the accounts generally developed within the DM framework, and argue that these proposals are highly problematic. 1 Concise introductions to Nanosyntax are also to be found in Baunaz and Lander (2018) and Starke (2009). Caha (2018) is an in depth discussion of the issues touched upon in Section 2. *Corresponding author: Knut Tarald Taraldsen, Department of Linguistics, The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway; and Department of Czech Language, Masaryk University, Brno, Czechia, E-mail: [email protected] 2 | K. T. Taraldsen: An introduction to Nanosyntax Proponents of DM offer two ways of dealing with cases like men. One way is to posit a morphological process, Fusion, that turns two adjacent terminals into one prior to lexical insertion (Halle and Marantz 1993: 136, 1994: 277). On this view, men would be inserted into the single terminal created by fusing N0 and Num0. The obvious problem with this view is that Fusion cannot apply freely. It must apply obligatorily in some cases so that *mans (as the plural of man) is excluded, and must be inapplicable in most cases to allow for regular plurals like boys. The generalization seems to be that N0 and Num0 must fuse just in case there happens to be a lexical item capable of spelling out the terminal created by Fusion, e.g. men, but this generalization isn’t easy to capture within DM where lexical insertion is governed by the Subset Principle: (1) The Subset Principle A morpheme A with the lexical entry A $ F (where F is a set of syntactic features) can replace a terminal T associated with the feature set F if and only if F is a subset of G. Presumably, the new terminal created by Fusion should be associated with the union of the feature sets asso- ciated with N0 and Num0. But then, (1) entails that any lexical item that can lexicalize N0 or Num0, can also lexicalize the outcome of fusing N0 and Num0, i.e. both just boy or just s should be able to mean ‘boys’:² 0 0 0 0 (2)a the feature sets of N and Num :N = A = { x1, x2, ..., xn }, Num = B = { y1, y2, ..., ym } 0 0 b the feature set of fused N + Num : the union of A and B = { x1, x2, ...xn, y1, y2, ..., ym } c lexical entries: boy $ A’ (a subset of A), s $ B’ (a subset of B) So, it seems necessary to stipulate that the application of Fusion is controlled by the lexicon in the sense that Fusion can apply if and only if the lexicon contains a morpheme associated with a feature set with members from both feature sets associated with the fused terminals. For example, if man has the entry man $ F, s has the entry s $ G and men has the entry men $ H where H is the union of F and G, N0 = F and Num0 = G can fuse, and the new terminal can be lexicalized by men, but not by man or s given the Elsewhere Principle: (3) The Elsewhere Principle (EP) Given a terminal T = F and lexical entries A $ G and B $ H with G and H both subsets of F, A wins if and only if G is a larger subset of F than H. In this scenario, Fusion not only can apply, but must, since otherwise *mans would be generated (with man lexicalizing just N0 and s lexicalizing Num0). Although making the application of Fusion contingent upon the existence of certain lexical entries gives the right results, a conceptual issue remains as emphasized in Caha (2018): In DM, Fusion is part of set of “morphological rules” that are taken to apply before lexical insertion, i.e. at a point of the derivation when the lexicon has not yet been consulted. The other way out of the problem with men would be to posit null morphemes, e.g. men might be parsed as men-Ø with Ø lexicalizing Num0 adjacent to N0 lexicalized by men (abstracting away from the ques- tion how N0 gets to be lexicalized by men rather than man in this case), adopting an idea by Halle and Marantz (1993: 124). But, as the detailed discussion in Caha (2018: Section 4) shows, this approach comes with unsurmountable problems of its own. In DM, the terminal nodes of a syntactic tree are represented as sets of syntactic features, so-called fea- ture bundles. In view of the widely accepted hypothesis that syntax is really driven by syntactic features, one might say that the ultimate building blocks of syntax are these features. But in DM, the syntactic features are buried inside unstructured sets associated with terminal nodes rather than being terminal nodes themselves. A competing view, typically held by advocates of the cartographic approach to syntax, holds that there is a one-to-one correspondence between syntactic features and syntactic terminals (see Cinque and Rizzi 2008). 2 The feature set associated with N0 is taken to include all (non-phonological) features needed to differentiate the nominal root boy from other roots, e.g. man, but a different view is developed in Caha et al. (2018). K. T. Taraldsen: An introduction to Nanosyntax | 3 On this view, the issues arising in connection with man/men will arise much more widely simply because the number of morphemes spelling out a sentence is often smaller than the number of syntactic features used to build the corresponding syntactic structure. 3 Phrasal lexicalization We have seen that DM doesn’t provide a coherent account of plural forms like men and have also just suggested that the problem is actually much more general since the ultimate building blocks of syntactic structures are likely to be syntactic features. But the problems dissolve once we adopt proposals by Michal Starke (lectures at the University of Tromsø and elsewhere, Starke 2009, 2011) and give up the traditional assumption that lexical items can only be inserted at terminal nodes.³ We can then simply say that men all by itself lexicalizes the entire phrase [N0 [ PL0 ]] when N0 has the features of the root man (see footnote 2). In NS, this requires that the lexicon contains the entry in (4), where MAN stands for whatever feature set characterizes the root man:⁴ (4) men $ [PlP [NP MAN] [ Pl ]] The operative principle is the Superset Principle (henceforth: SuperP): (5) The Superset Principle A morpheme A with the entre A $ T can lexicalize a syntactic structure S if and only if S is identical to a subtree of T.
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