The Road Or the Door to Exponence? Examining Simultaneity at Spell-Out1
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Nicholas Rolle The Morphology and Syntax Workshop 2019.Jan.25 University of Chicago THE ROAD OR THE DOOR TO EXPONENCE? EXAMINING SIMULTANEITY AT SPELL-OUT1 Nicholas Rolle, Princeton University [1] Notion of ‘spell-out’ invoked in discussing linguistic interfaces across disciplines a. Syntax e.g. Minimalism/Generative syntax [Chomsky 1995, Uriagereka 1999, 2012, Dobashi 2004, a.o.] b. Morphology e.g. Distributed Morphology [Halle & Marantz 1993, Embick & Noyer 2001, Embick 2010, 2015, Arregi & Nevins 2012] c. Phonology e.g. Match Theory, Direct vs. Indirect Interface debates [Selkirk 2009, 2011, Elfner 2012, 2015, a.o] [2] This has left the field of interface studies – and particular ‘interface-ists’, e.g. Scheer 2011 – wondering how to fit it all together [3] Big picture questions: what constitutes spell-out? and is spell-out (i) serial and rule- based, (ii) parallel and constraint-based, (iii) something else/in-between? [4] I argue / have argued for a hybrid OT-DM framework, which has commitments both to a realizational, syntax-driven morphology but also constraint-based parallelism [5] But more interesting…: what can looking at post-syntax as a parallel and optimizing system get us? What are its predictions and how do they pan out? [6] Three predictions: a. Outward-looking phonologically-conditioned allomorphy b. No opacity at spell-out c. No access to syntax post-spell-out [7] Roadmap: a. What is an OT-DM framework? b. A case study of Cilungu tonal allomorphy which looks like outward-looking phonologically-conditioned allomorphy (though it’s complicated…) [8] Take away point: spell-out is a mapping between modules, and post-syntactic operations themselves constitute the substance of this mapping 1 Thank you to my colleagues Laura Kalin, Byron Ahn, Sam Zukoff, and Florian Lionnet for initial feedback, and many others at Princeton and Berkeley for talking to me over the years. Nicholas Rolle The road or the door to exponence? 1 AN OT-DM FRAMEWORK 1.1 A rocky start… [9] OT & morphology theory: In many approaches to morphology, an OT model and parallelism have been welcomed [Cophonology Theory - Inkelas & Zoll 2007; Optimal Construction Morphology - Cabellero & Inkelas 2013; Stratal OT - Kiparsky 2015; see summary of OT approaches to morphology in Xu 2016] [10] Optimality Theory and Distributed Morphology – emerging in the same (North American) generative period in the 90s – are assumed to be at odds with one another a. Embick (2010:ix) - DM “is incompatible with the dominant view in phonological theory, Optimality Theory (OT), which posits competition among infinite sets of complex objects” [emphasis mine; see also observations by Tucker 2011:200] [11] Since their respective inceptions, however, there have been many rumblings regarding the relationship between OT and DM (or at least some principle belonging to one or the other), and even some recent nascent debates [Noyer 1992, 1994, Bonet 1994, Trommer 2001a, 2001b, 2002, Don & Blom 2006, Opitz 2008, Haugen 2008, 2011, Wolf 2008, 2013, 2015, Lahne 2010, Tucker 2011, Günes 2015, Keine & Müller 2015, Brown 2017, Dawson 2017, Arregi & Nevins 2017, Deal & Wolf 2017, Franks 2017, Kiparsky 2017, Sande 2017, Vergara & Lopez 2017, Abramovitz 2018, Guseva & Weisser 2018, Rolle 2019, Foley’s to appear Optimal Vocabulary Insertion] [12] A cline from DM to OT: (1) DM (2) R&C-DM (3) OT-DM (4) OT-CC/OI (5) OT (1) Distributed Morphology (DM) [Halle & Marantz 1993, Marantz 1997, 2000, 2001, Embick & Noyer 2001, Embick 2010, 2015, etc.] (2) Rules & Constraints Distributed Morphology R&C-DM a ‘constraint-and-repair approach’ – Kiparsky 2017; a ‘Filter & Hierarchy’ approach – Trommer 2001a [Arregi & Nevins 2012] (3) Optimality-Theoretic Distributed Morphology (OT-DM) [Trommer 2001a, 2001b, Dawson 2017, Rolle 2019, Foley to appear; see Trommer 2001a, Rolle 2019 for historical context] (4) OT with Candidate Chains (OT-CC) / Optimal Interleaving (OI) [Wolf 2008, 2013, 2015] (5) Optimality Theory (OT) [Prince & Smolensky 2004 [1993], McCarthy & Prince 1993a, 1993b, Mester 1994, Kager 1996, 1999, a.o.] 2 Nicholas Rolle The road or the door to exponence? [13] R&C-DM effectively use constraints to provide insight into and a trigger for specific post-syntactic operations: “In order to capture the pandialectal fact that certain combinations of participant clitics are targets of Impoverishment, we propose that Participant Dissimilation rules are triggered by the following markedness constraint: Syntagmatic Participant Markedness An auxiliary M-word cannot contain two clitics Cl1 and Cl2 such that Cl1 is specified as [+participant, Φ] and Cl2 is specified as [+participant,Ψ]” [Arregi & Nevins 2012:214, emphasis mine] [14] Optimality-Theoretic Distributed Morphology (OT-DM) [Trommer 2001a, Rolle 2019] a. Only constraints, no rules: Post-syntactic operations are decomposed into a series of constraints which apply in parallel b. All aspects of DM are maintained, except rule-based seriality See Appendix 1 c. Other than OT-DM, another name you could call it is: (Modular) Item-Based Realizational Non-Lexicalist Syntax-Driven Phonology- Free Optimality-Theoretical Morphology [(M)IBRNLSDPFOTM] 1.2 The substance of spell-out [15] Broadly, the mapping of syntactic structure to a phonological representation [16] Its purpose can be understood to ‘externalize’ an internal linguistic construction for communicative intent (at least on the PF side of things) [Why it doesn’t map directly to motor planning and articulation is a separate question…] [17] Y-Model of grammar (or ‘T-model’) [Chomsky 1981, Freidin & Lasnik 2011:13, Idsardi & Raimy 2013, Harley 2014, Bobaljik 2017, among numerous variants] Syntactic derivation Spell-out Phonetic Form (PF) Logical Form (LF) [≈ Phonology] [≈ Semantics] [18] Morpho-syntactic module maps to morpho-phonological module at spell-out Appendix 4 3 Nicholas Rolle The road or the door to exponence? [19] Input-output components of spell-out [Rolle 2018] a. /S/ is the input - the ‘syntactic image’ b. \Ƨ\ is the output - the ‘phonological image’ [20] Morpho-syntactic module: a. Primitives taken from the feature lexicon, bundles of morphosyntactic features (‘SynSem features’ in Embick 2015:34) [Narrow Lexicon - Marantz 1997:204; List A - Harley & Noyer 1999; List 1 - Harley 2014; List of Syntactic Atoms - Bobaljik 2017] b. Syntactic structure built up cyclically via Merge, proceeds bottom-up/inside-out [Chomsky 1995, Epstein 1999:325, Richards 2011:175-182, Uriagereka 2011, a.o.] [21] Morpho-phonological module: a. Ample evidence for cyclicity (or at least cyclic effects), catalogued in detail in Inkelas (2014:189-241) [Chomsky, Halle, & Lukoff 1956, Kean 1974, Mascaró 1976, Kiparsky 1982, Cole 1995, Benua 1997, Chen 2000:116, Hyman 2017; a good, recent discussion piece in Kastner 2018, a.o.] [‘Obligatory inheritance’ of a previous cycle, i.e. that ‘later evaluations [are forced] to inherit the results of earlier ones’ Steriade 2012:4] [22] An inside-out characterization of cyclicity is the most-common position across many subfields, frameworks, modules, and phenomena [Carstairs 1987; Bobaljik 2000; Carstairs-McCarthy 2001; Embick 2010:42; Bermúdez-Otero 2011; a.o.] [23] Spell-out primarily involves the ‘actuation of phonology’ Spell-out operation Provides a. Vocabulary insertion Phonological substance (primitives) [phonemes, tonemes, autosegments, etc.] b. Linearization Phonological precedence [basic morph order] c. Prosodification Phonological constituency [metrical structure, prosodic words, prosodic phrases, etc.] d. Hierarchy exchange Scope of phonological operations [scope/order of the application of phonological rules] [24] Vocabulary items (i.e. the morphs associating form to meaning) are inserted via vocabulary insertion (taken from Vocabulary), in the curly bracketed objects { } – each labelled for reference {VI}, i.e. {DOG} [Articulated VI structure in Sande & Jenks 2017, Rolle 2018] [25] Interface literature ripe with numerous, less-phonological spell-out operations a. Bundle manipulation – e.g. ‘fusion’, ‘fission’, insertion/deletion of morphosyntactic features (e.g. via ‘dissociated node insertion’, ‘enrichment’, ‘impoverishment’, etc.) [Embick & Noyer 2001, Müller 2007, Embick 2015, a.o.] b. Syntax-like operations such as DM’s ‘lowering’ (movement of X⁰ down to its closest head it c-commands), or its counterpart ‘raising’ [Embick & Noyer 2001, Chomsky 2001:37, Schoorlemmer & Temmerman 2012, Harizanov & Gribanova 2018] 4 Nicholas Rolle The road or the door to exponence? c. Economy conditions (e.g. multiple copy resolution, deletion-under-identity, e.g. suspended affixation) [Booij 1985, Kabak 2007, Merchant 2012, Guseva & Weisser 2018] [26] Not to mention where intonation/prosodic correlates of information structure fit in… 1.3 Morphology-in-parallel hypothesis (MIPH) [27] Post-syntactic operations apply in parallel in a constraint-based architecture a. One interaction of operations which apply simultaneously to ‘actuate’ phonology b. This does not preclude the possibility of multiple cycles of spell-out (i.e. ‘phases’) [28] Spell-out (and by extension morphology) itself is not a module a. Cf. Paradigm Functional Morphology (PFM) where ‘morphology is an autonomous system’ [Bonami & Stump forthcoming] [29] Morphology-in-parallel hypothesis (MIPH) The substance of spell-out are a set of post-syntactic ‘operations’ which map a syntactic image / S / to an optimal phonological image \ Ƨ , applying in parallel within an OT architecture (involving morphological CON, EVAL, GEN,