Beware Occam’s Syntactic Razor: Morphotactic Analysis and Spanish Mesoclisis

Harris and Halle (2005) present a framework (hereafter, Generalized Reduplication) that unites the treatment of phonological reduplication and metathesis with similar phenomena in morphology, thereby accounting for the apparently spurious placement of the imperative plural -n in mesoclitic Spanish forms such as hága-lo-n ‘Do it!’, in which clitic lo is sandwiched between the verbal stem and the plural suffix. Subsequently, Kayne (2010) has challenged their analysis, arguing that such cases should be treated purely within the syntax. In this paper, we reassess some of Kayne’s arguments, agreeing with his conclusion that the most important desiderata of any general analysis of these sorts of phenomena is restrictiveness. However, we contend that greater restrictiveness can be achieved through morphotactic constraints and repairs in the Generalized Reduplication formalism, triggered by a Noninitiality condition on the positioning of the plural affix, and develop a set of conditions on these operations that situate the locus of interspeaker variation within the postsyntactic component

A monoradical approach to some cases of disuppletion

This paper, a commentary on Harley 2014, explores cases of disuppletive roots, such as destroy/destruct, persons/people, and worse/badder, the predominant approach to which is to assume that these come from different roots. We adopt a monoradical approach to such cases, claiming that they always involve the same root, but that the suppletive allomorphy is conditioned by the presence or absence of additional functional heads in the structure. We also posit that defective verbs in Spanish, an extreme case of disuppletion (whereby one of the exponents of this root is ineffable), receive a straightforward analysis as a case of contextually limited allomorphy, following Harley's postulate that certain formatives may have no elsewhere item on either the LF or the PF side (the Encyclopedic List and the Exponent List, respectively)

Laser induced phase transition in epitaxial FeRh layers studied by pump-probe valence band photoemission

We use time-resolved X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy to probe the electronic and magnetization dynamics in FeRh films after ultrafast laser excitations. We present experimental and theoretical results which investigate the electronic structure of FeRh during the first-order phase transition, identifying a clear signature of the magnetic phase.We find that a spin polarized feature at the Fermi edge is a fingerprint of the magnetic status of the system that is independent of the long-range ferromagnetic alignment of the magnetic domains.We use this feature to follow the phase transition induced by a laser pulse in a pump-probe experiment and find that the magnetic transition occurs in less than 50 ps and reaches its maximum in 100 ps

The fine structure of the comparative

The paper provides evidence for a more articulated structure of the comparative as compared with the one in Bobaljik (2012). We propose to split up Bobaljik's cmpr head into two distinct heads, C1 and C2. Looking at Czech, Old Church Slavonic and English, we show that this proposal explains a range of facts about suppletion and allomorphy. A crucial ingredient of our analysis is the claim that adjectival roots are not a-categorial, but spell out adjectival functional structure. Specifically, we argue that adjectival roots come in various types, differing in the amount of functional structure they spell out. In order to correctly model the competition between roots, we further introduce a Faithfulness Restriction on Cyclic Override, which allows us to dispense with the Elsewhere Principle

Lexical Knowledge Representation in an Intelligent Dictionary Help System

This paper describes the knowledge representation model adopted in IDHS to represent the lexical knowledge acquired from the source dictionary. Once the acquisition process has been performed and the DKB built, some enrichment processes have been executed on the DKB in order to enhance its knowledge about the words in the language. Besides, the dynamic exploitation of this knowledge is made possible by means of specially conceived deduction mechanisms. Both the enrichment processes and the dynamic deduction mechanisms are based on the exploitation of the properties of the lexical semantic relations represented in the DKB. In the following section an overview of IDHS is given. Section 3 briefly presents the process of construction of the DKB. The knowledge representation model and the enrichment mechanisms are fully described in sections 4 and 5. Section 6 describes some inferential aspects of the system. Finally, in section 7, some figures about the size of the prototype built are presented. 2 THE IDHS DICTIONARY SYSTEM