So, last semester I ran into some sleeping issues that ate up the time I might have spent blogging my morphology course. Since these issues are finally resolving, I hope to catch up and review some of what I learned last semester teaching the class. However, morphology continues this semester in a seminar I’m co-teaching with Stephanie Harves. Topic: Argument Structure and Morphology. While, inevitably, the seminar will end up discussing the biggies – causatives, applicatives, and nominalizations – we do intend to focus on particular issues to frame our reading of some current literature, particularly research of past and present students. Let me outline some of these issues in the interest of drumming up comments and suggestions from any blog-readers (and, yes, synthetic compounds should come up as well).

A key topic for the connections among syntax, morphology and argument structure is whether roots take arguments/complements, the alternative being that roots must be categorized as nouns, verbs, adjective or prepositions prior to the resulting head merging with complements. Here I see three major proposals, with some mixing and matching of subproposals across the three general lines of research. The approach associated with the Hale/Keyser position has roots in the position of arguments (and/or predicates) below a v/V head, into which they incorporate or amalgamate/coalesce. The second approach (H. Harley as a proponent) sees roots as argument-takers such that a vP would consist of a v and a rootP containing the internal arguments of the verb. The third approach, which I have been investigating lately, assumes that roots must be first-merged with a categorizing head (or another root) as an adjunct to that head such that any effects of a root on argument structure must be mediated by the categorizing head.

A related topic, one that we actually began the seminar with, although obliquely, is that of the nature of the categorizing heads n, v, and adj. We revisited a paper by Paul Kiparsky (Kiparsky, Paul. “Nominal verbs and transitive nouns: Vindicating lexicalism.” On looking into words (and beyond)(2017): 311) that argues against a view of the distinction between gerunds and complex event nominalizations that ties the difference simply to the height of attachment of a categorizing n head. On this view, the gerunds have the n head high, at least above voice and perhaps above aspect, while the complex event nominalizations have it low, say attached to the vP. Kiparsky’s main argument is that there is a sense of “noun” in which the event nominalizations are nouns but the gerunds aren’t. Although in English gerunds can take subjects with the possessive clitic (John’s running the race), and although in many languages the gerund itself may be a case-marked word that, morphophonologically, looks like a noun, Kiparsky argues that in English and other languages, the gerunds (which are part of the inflectional paradigm of a verb) don’t take adjectives or, for that matter, anything else associated with DP structure. He suggests, covertly following the analysis of Reuland (Reuland, E. J. (1983). Governing-ing. Linguistic Inquiry, 14(1), 101-136), that the gerund head has case attracting features but is not of category N/n.

We’ll be discussing Jim Wood’s recent book ms. on Icelandic nominalizations soon. Jim argues that Icelandic nominalizes verbs, not vPs, for complex event nominalizations. I think, given Kiparsky’s cross-linguistic insights about gerunds, this has to be true in general. That is, the category heads n, v and adj attach to categorized stems and/or to roots and begin the extended projection associated with their heads. Of course i*, then, must be treated as “derivational” in some sense, not part of the extended projection of a category head, since one can nominalize or verbalize or adjectivalize a structure with an i* (voice, etc.) head.

I’ll write more about these ideas soon, but in this context we must tip our hats to Hagit Borer, who argued that the category heads like n and v are really associated with the higher functional structure and not substantive morphemes. So, nouns are in some sense induced by higher DP type heads in a way that points to Kiparsky’s generalization about the distinction between gerunds (no DP structure) and complex event nominalizations (yes DP structure).

If we look at Halle & Marantz (1993) for the origins of Distributed Morphology, we see a framework designed to show that inflectional morphemes should be pieces, distributed syntactically and realized phonologically after the syntax. In a sense, Halle & Marantz (1993) is an immediate expansion of Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures, as I will Blog about later. In his analysis of the English auxiliary system employing “affix hopping,” Chomsky does syntactic word formation and late insertion for inflectional morphemes, in much the same way as DM (nihil sub sole novum, particularly in Noam’s shadow).

But Harley & Noyer 1999, in their introduction to DM, actually emphasize thinking that went into my 1997 “No Escape from Syntax” paper and my 2000 WCCFL talk that spawned the heavily cited “Words” manuscript. Thus they present DM as essentially anti-“lexicalist.” There’s a concentration of issues surrounding derivational morphemes and roots, rather than inflection, and one sees there the strands of thought that Heidi will pursue in her later work.

Before turning to the “lexicalism” that DM was “anti-“ in the 1990’s, I should clarify two uses of “lexicalist,” only one of which is relevant to this post. On the non-relevant reading, a “lexicalist” endorses the notion that morphemes are “lexical items” in the sense of units that relate or contain both sound and meaning, with “meaning” broadly construed. This is the “morphemes are signs” position that often gets derided in the literature (see e.g. recent work by Blevins). It’s in this sense of “lexicalist” that, e.g., Lieber in Deconstructing Morphology is a lexicalist and Kayne is a lexicalist. These guys are serious, and their work cannot and should not be dismissed by waving at reduplication, zero morphs, patterns of syncretism in paradigms, etc. (see e.g. recent work by Blevins). It’s great for the field that serious linguists pursue this lexicalist hypothesis.

However, the lexicalism of anti-lexicalism in the 1990’s was the MIT-style lexicalism that was being explored in the Lexicon Project, a position associated with, e.g., certain versions of Lexical Morphology and Phonology, a position inspired by Wasow’s work contrasting lexical and syntactic rules, a position driving early versions of Lexical-Functional Grammar, and a position also endorsed by Chomsky at various points (see the discussion at the end of Halle & Marantz 1993). This view said that there was a difference between word formation before syntax (in the lexicon) and word formation that might be post-syntactic, and that the syntax operated on morphologically complex words from the lexicon, rather than on morphemes. There was a spirit around that a nexus of Chomsky’s “Remarks on Nominalization,” Kiparsky’s Lexical Morphology and Phonology, Wasow’s Lexical vs. Syntactic Rules, Lieber’s work on word formation, and Levin’s work on lexical semantics was creating a coherent and compelling picture of a Lexicon for generative grammar. The “No Escape” paper was meant to pop the bubble specifically by questioning the correlation of properties associated with “wordhood” that underlay the apparent consensus on the Lexicon. To perhaps oversimplify the conclusions of that paper, I argued that the “special behavior” that was claimed to distinguish lexical properties from syntactic properties was better understood as the local determination of properties of roots in the context of the first category node merged above them. Phonological wordhood per se was largely irrelevant to the syntactic, semantic, and morphological properties of a language.

By the end of the 1990’s, any notion of a transtheoretical consensus on a “lexicon” had vanished, and arguments for versions of lexicalism became more nuanced – less vulnerable to the Wreck-It Ralph treatment of “No Escape…” There’s less of a notion that a striking set of correlations converge on properties of a word as opposed to a syntactic phrase, and perhaps more of a notion that the lexicon allows for the unruly (the “lawless” for Di Sciullo and Williams) whereas the syntax plays by the rules. I hope to Blog on more recent anti-anti-Lexicalist positions later in the semester (e.g. papers by Kiparsky and by Bruening). As previewed in the Harley & Noyer article, the 2000’s saw an emphasis on the syntactic treatment of derivational morphology and of uncategorized roots of words. This work was and is not specifically or essentially anti-lexicalist – depends on the particulars on one’s theory of the lexicon. The work does however reject the notion that word formation is ever “lawless” – the adoption of syntactic word formation along with the strict locality implications that go along with this adoption in certain theoretical worlds is supposed to reduce the wiggle room for morphological analysis. So, less “anti-lexicalist” and more “pro-decomposition into minimal syntactic units organized hierarchically and subject to the locality constraints visible in syntax” or some such.

So, Neil Myler and I are supposed to be writing a chapter on the topic of Contextual Allosemy for a DM volume. I thought I could Blog what I think is at stake here, to let the enormous Blogosphere let us know if we’re missing anything. All three of you readers. In our mind, the topic of contextual allosemy divides in two: contextual meanings of roots, and contextual meanings of functional morphemes. Both types of contextual allosemy, whether or not they reduce to a single phenomenon, should be subject to two sorts of locality constraints. Within the first phase in which they meet the interfaces, the trigger of allosemy – the context for contextual allosemy – must be structurally local to the target item whose meaning is being conditioned. In Marantz 2013 (Marantz, A. (2013). Locality domains for contextual allomorphy across the interfaces. Distributed morphology today: Morphemes for morris halle, 95-115), I suggested that the locality constraint here was adjacency, where semantically null items are invisible to the computation of the relevant “next to” relationship. Additionally, since the meaning of an element should be computed when it first hits the semantic interface, anything outside its first phase of interpretation could not serve to trigger a special meaning.

If Embick (perhaps Embick and me) is right, roots need to be categorized in the syntax – they won’t emerge bare at the semantic interface. So in a sense roots are always subject to contextual allosemy; they don’t have a bare semantic value. For functional morphemes, we’re inspired by Neil’s work on possession, where the little v that will be pronounced “have” is given a null interpretation in predicate possessive constructions. What’s suggested in Marantz 2013 is that contextual allosemy for functional morphemes involves a toggle between a specific meaning – say introducing an event variable for little v – and no meaning. The “no meaning” option creates situations in which a phonologically overt (but semantically null) morpheme fails to intervene between a trigger of contextual allosemy and a root subject to allosemy even though the morpheme intervenes phonologically (and thus would block contextual allomorphy between the trigger and the root).

I’ve been thinking more about this topic in light of phonological work by my colleague Juliet Stanton with Donca Steriade (Stanton, J. & Steriade, D. (2014). Stress windows and Base Faithfulness in English suffixal derivatives. (Handout)). S&S argue that, in English derivational morphology, the determination of the pronunciation of a derived form may depend on the pronunciation of a form of the root morpheme not included in the (cyclic) derivation of the form. For example, the first vowel of “atomicity” finds its quality, as a secondarily stressed vowel, in the form “atom” – the first vowel of its stem, “atomic,” is a reduced shwa from which the necessary value for stressed “a” in “atomicity” cannot be determined. If we’re thinking in DM terms, the adjective “atomic” should constitute a phase for phonological and semantic interpretation, after which the underlying vowel of “atom” in “atomic” would no longer be accessible, e.g., in the phase where noun “atomicity” is processed.

This argument assumes, reasonably, that “atomicity” has “atomic” as its base. The -ity ending is potentiated by -ic, and the derivation of a noun in -ity from an adjective in -ic is perhaps even productive. But is “atomicity” derived from “atomic” semantically?

Here’s the online definition of “atomic” in the sense most relevant to “atomicity”:

adjective
1. relating to an atom or atoms.
“the atomic nucleus”
o CHEMISTRY
(of a substance) consisting of uncombined atoms rather than molecules.
“atomic hydrogen”
o of or forming a single irreducible unit or component in a larger system.
“a society made up of atomic individuals pursuing private interests”

Here’s “atomicity”:

noun
1.
CHEMISTRY
the number of atoms in the molecules of an element.
2.
the state or fact of being composed of indivisible units.

Note that it’s “atomic individuals” and the “atomicity of society,” not the “atomicity of individuals” or “atomic society” (“atomic society” is post-apocalyptic). I think one can make the case that both “atomic” and “atomicity” (here in their non-nuclear, non-chemistry meanings) are semantically derived directly from “atom.”

Perhaps, then, the non-cyclicity of “atomicity” phonologically is paralleled by its non-cyclicity semantically, as would need to be the case in a strict interpretation of derivation by phase within DM. We would need -ic NOT to trigger a phase, meaning it could not be the realization of a little a node. I believe we’d need to commit to a theory in which the phonological form of most derivational affixes are the realizations of roots, not of category determining heads. So -ic in “atomicity” could then be a root attached to a category neutral head that does not trigger a phase. This conclusion that derivational affixes include phonologically contentful but a-categorical roots has already been argued for by Lowenstamm (on phonological grounds) and by De Belder (on syntactic and semantic grounds). De Belder specifically claims that -ic does not have an inherent category; we can point to words like “music,” “attic,” “traffic,” “mimic,” etc., alongside of words that are N/Adj ambiguous like “agnostic,” “stoic,” mystic,” etc.

In conclusion, although the within-phase domains of contextual allosemy and contextual allomorphy might diverge because null morphemes don’t intervene for the trigger/target relation of context/undergoer and what’s null in the phonology may differ from what’s null in the semantics, the phases that define the biggest domains from contextual allosemy/allomorphy might be the same. Standard DM assumes they are: one phase to rule them all.