Processing morphological ambiguity: An experimental investigation of Russian numerical phrases

Russian nouns in nominative and accusative numerical expressions appear in three different forms, depending on the numeral: nominative singular with the numeral 1, genitive singular with the paucal numerals 2–4, and genitive plural with all other numerals. Results from an acceptability judgment task and a self-paced reading task on Russian case/number marking provide support for a theory stating that the suffix used with paucal nouns is morphologically ambiguous. The ambiguity resolution process involving this suffix leads to extra processing cost, compared to the unambiguous suffixes in other numeral contexts (the number 1, and the numbers 5+). This would account for the additional processing time observed with the paucal nouns. The status of the form occurring with the paucal numerals has long been a challenging issue in Russian linguistics, and the new results add to the growing body of literature which makes use of experimental methods to address issues of linguistic theory and analysis.Linguistic

Revisiting the Person Case Constraint in Czech

Linguistic

NonInitiality within Spell-Out Domains: Unifying the Post-Syntactic Behavior of Bulgarian Dative Clitics

Possessive (nominal) and indirect object (clausal) clitics are homophonous within the Balkan Slavic languages and Romanian. Pancheva (2004) shows that this syncretism is not just morphophonological but that the two types of clitics constitute identical feature bundles bearing dative case. Yet, these dative clitics seem to exhibit distinct behavior in the nominal and clausal domains: in Bulgarian the nominal clitics appear in second position within the nominal phrase while the clausal clitics are verb-adjacent and non-initial within the clause. It is puzzling that the same syntactic objects exhibit such different distributional patterns. I argue that in Bulgarian this seemingly distinct behavior follows from the interaction of a distributional constraint on dative clitics, NonInitiality within Spell-Out domains, and the different structural properties of the syntactic domains they are associated with. In particular, a number of constituents can be pre-clitic in clauses because various structural positions are available above the clitic, while in nominal phrases no comparable positions are available. Besides the direct consequences of this approach for the treatment of cliticization, it also provides an insight into the nature of Spell-Out domains, nominal and clausal structure, and the nature of syntax/PF interactions

Head movement to specifier positions

Syntactic movement of phrases, modeled in terms of Internal Merge, has traditionally been distinguished on empirical grounds from syntactic movement of heads, modeled by other means. I demonstrate that, once the class of head movements implicated in word formation is excluded from consideration (assumed to be, for example, post-syntactic, following Harizanov & Gribanova 2019), the residue of head movements, which are purely syntactic in nature, and phrasal movement can receive a unified treatment. Both phrasal and syntactic head movement are implemented here as instances of Internal Merge (following, for example, Fukui & Takano 1998; Toyoshima 2001; Matushansky 2006; Vicente 2007; 2009). This treatment of syntactic head movement renders long-standing stipulations about structure building such as the Chain Uniformity Condition superfluous. It also makes sense of the properties of syntactic head movement, as demonstrated in a case study of participle fronting in Bulgarian, which targets a specifier position, violates the Head Movement Constraint, can cross finite clause boundaries, and can have discourse effects

On the Mapping from Syntax to Morphophonology

If both words and phrases are internally complex and can be decomposed into hierarchically organized constituents, what is the relation between the syntactically motivated constituency of phrases and the morphophonologically motivated constituency of words? In particular, is the correspondence between syntactic atoms and morphophonological words one-to-one or, in other words, does syntax only manipulate objects that are as small as words? These questions have generated a long line of productive research that has identified various mismatches between syntax and morphophonology: e.g. while some syntactic atoms are realized as autonomous morphophonological words, others are realized as subparts of words. Such results have, in turn, motivated approaches to word construction that are syntactic in nature.In this dissertation I provide novel evidence that the atoms of syntax are smaller than morphophonological words, which leads to the conclusion words are built out of syntactic objects and, at least in part, by syntactic mechanisms. As far as the cases investigated here are concerned, what gives words their distinctive character and causes them to behave differently from phrases with respect to morphophonology is the application of Morphological Merger. Specifically, syntactically independent objects become the constituent parts of morphophonological words as the result of Morphological Merger, an operation that produces complex heads as part of the mapping from syntax to morphophonology.The evidence I provide in this dissertation allows a particularly direct diagnosis of the syntactic independence of various subconstituents of morphophonological words. More specifically, it involves, for example, the interaction of subwords with syntactic operations (like movement), quantifier stranding, various kinds of binding, and thematic interpretation. Furthermore, while much previous work on complex word formation has centered on words constructed by the combination of a head with its complement (e.g. "incorporation") or with the head of its complement (e.g. "head movement"), this dissertation focuses on a less studied correspondence between syntax and morphophonology: words constructed out of a head and its specifier.The particular view of the syntax-morphophonology interface espoused in this dissertation is developed on the basis of case studies from Bulgarian, a South Slavic language. As a result, a major concern throughout is the description and analysis of a number of important phenomena attested in Bulgarian: cliticization and clitic doubling, deverbal nominalization, and denominal adjectivization, among others. This dissertation provides a unified understanding of these phenomena to the extent that they all involve the syntactic construction of morphophonological words, which are produced by a mapping procedure that involves the application of Morphological Merger

NonInitiality within Spell-Out Domains: Unifying the Post-Syntactic Behavior of Bulgarian Dative Clitics

Possessive (nominal) and indirect object (clausal) clitics are homophonous within the Balkan Slavic languages and Romanian. Pancheva (2004) shows that this syncretism is not just morphophonological but that the two types of clitics constitute identical feature bundles bearing dative case. Yet, these dative clitics seem to exhibit distinct behavior in the nominal and clausal domains: in Bulgarian the nominal clitics appear in second position within the nominal phrase while the clausal clitics are verb-adjacent and non-initial within the clause. It is puzzling that the same syntactic objects exhibit such different distributional patterns. I argue that in Bulgarian this seemingly distinct behavior follows from the interaction of a distributional constraint on dative clitics, NonInitiality within Spell-Out domains, and the different structural properties of the syntactic domains they are associated with. In particular, a number of constituents can be pre-clitic in clauses because various structural positions are available above the clitic, while in nominal phrases no comparable positions are available. Besides the direct consequences of this approach for the treatment of cliticization, it also provides an insight into the nature of Spell-Out domains, nominal and clausal structure, and the nature of syntax/PF interactions

On the Mapping from Syntax to Morphophonology

If both words and phrases are internally complex and can be decomposed into hierarchically organized constituents, what is the relation between the syntactically motivated constituency of phrases and the morphophonologically motivated constituency of words? In particular, is the correspondence between syntactic atoms and morphophonological words one-to-one or, in other words, does syntax only manipulate objects that are as small as words? These questions have generated a long line of productive research that has identified various mismatches between syntax and morphophonology: e.g. while some syntactic atoms are realized as autonomous morphophonological words, others are realized as subparts of words. Such results have, in turn, motivated approaches to word construction that are syntactic in nature.In this dissertation I provide novel evidence that the atoms of syntax are smaller than morphophonological words, which leads to the conclusion words are built out of syntactic objects and, at least in part, by syntactic mechanisms. As far as the cases investigated here are concerned, what gives words their distinctive character and causes them to behave differently from phrases with respect to morphophonology is the application of Morphological Merger. Specifically, syntactically independent objects become the constituent parts of morphophonological words as the result of Morphological Merger, an operation that produces complex heads as part of the mapping from syntax to morphophonology.The evidence I provide in this dissertation allows a particularly direct diagnosis of the syntactic independence of various subconstituents of morphophonological words. More specifically, it involves, for example, the interaction of subwords with syntactic operations (like movement), quantifier stranding, various kinds of binding, and thematic interpretation. Furthermore, while much previous work on complex word formation has centered on words constructed by the combination of a head with its complement (e.g. "incorporation") or with the head of its complement (e.g. "head movement"), this dissertation focuses on a less studied correspondence between syntax and morphophonology: words constructed out of a head and its specifier.The particular view of the syntax-morphophonology interface espoused in this dissertation is developed on the basis of case studies from Bulgarian, a South Slavic language. As a result, a major concern throughout is the description and analysis of a number of important phenomena attested in Bulgarian: cliticization and clitic doubling, deverbal nominalization, and denominal adjectivization, among others. This dissertation provides a unified understanding of these phenomena to the extent that they all involve the syntactic construction of morphophonological words, which are produced by a mapping procedure that involves the application of Morphological Merger

Prosodic Smothering in Macedonian and Kaqchikel

This article deals with a so-far unnoticed phenomenon in prosodic phonology, which we dub prosodic smothering. Prosodic smothering arises when the prosodic status of a clitic or affix varies with the presence or absence of some outer morpheme. We first illustrate prosodic smothering with novel data from two genetically unrelated languages, Macedonian (Slavic) and Kaqchikel (Mayan). We then provide a unified account of prosodic smothering based on a principled extension of the theory of prosodic subcategorization (e.g., Inkelas 1990 , Peperkamp 1997 , Chung 2003 , Yu 2003 , Paster 2006 , Bye 2007 ). Prosodic subcategorization typically involves requirements placed on items to the left or the right of the selecting morpheme. We show that prosodic smothering naturally emerges in a theory that also allows for subcategorization in the vertical dimension, such that morphemes may select for the prosodic category that immediately dominates them in surface prosodic structure. This extension successfully reduces two apparent cases of nonlocal prosodic conditioning to the effects of strictly local prosodic selection