Carson Schutze: my current work in DM-spirited morphology

[Martha McGinnis]

Hi everyone,

At Martha's encouragement, I'm posting a little summary of things I'm working
on or thinking about that involve morphology "in the spirit of DM". What I
mean is, they don't rely on much/any of the sort of technicalia that have been
discussed here recently (those paradigms scare me!), but they do crucially
rely on having a morphological component of the DM sort, namely, one that is
post-syntactic, (mostly?) interpretive rather than filtering, uses
underspecification, and is able to deal with genuinely syntactic
representations, relations, etc.

These ideas are in various states of development, between half-baked and
burned to a crisp, but comments on any/all would be most welcome. Those that
are written up, I will be happy to send to people.

1) Default case. I have a manuscript on this, arguing that the right notion of
default case can explain lots of otherwise puzzling facts about morphological
case marking both in English and crosslinguistically. (And that most other
notions of default case in the literature are nonsensical.) The account can be
seen as working out and further supporting the basic view of default case from
Marantz 1991 (ESCOL). In a nutshell, morphology provides a last-resort way to
spell out nominals that fail to acquire case features by case assignment,
concord, or any other "syntactic" means. Languages vary in which forms they
pick for this purpose, and perhaps even choose individual items
idiosyncratically from different parts of the paradigm. This explains why even
very close dialects differ in their case marking choices in certain corners of
the syntax, and perhaps more importantly, allows even the English pronominal
case system to be seen as behaving in a pretty "well behaved" way, relative to
"rich" case languages.

2) Agreement and its "maximization". Those familiar with my dissertation will
know that a central proposal was a cross-derivational syntactic principle
called "Accord Maximization", which governed the insertion of
case and agreement features into a syntactic tree.  (Those not familiar with
my dissertation, MITWPL will be happy to sell you a copy right away! :-)
The power of the cross-derivational comparisons was always a worry with this
proposal, however, so I'm now working out how Accord Maximization could be
implemented entirely in the morphological component, on the view (again from
Marantz 91) that all of morphological case and agreement might be introduced
there, i.e., postsyntactically (in the narrowest sense of syntax). The trick
is to make Vocabulary Insertion do a bit more work than it standardly does.
Specifically, when figuring out which item to insert in a slot for an
agreement affix, say, V.I. needs to go hunt for an eligible set of features to
express (eligibility being determined in terms of syntactic notions like
command and locality). Since V.I. tries to insert the most highly specified
items first, it will always mark agreement if possible, but if there are no
eligible things to agree with, a default affix will be inserted. I think this
captures the generalization, "If you can agree you must, but if not it's OK",
which characterizes the data I was looking at, and which is very hard to
implement in Minimalist feature-checking terms.

3) "Semantically empty lexical heads." This is in manuscript form as well. The
central claim is that not just affixes but also lexical heads (N,V,A, maybe P)
have default vocabulary items, and that taking seriously their status as
lacking encyclopedic meaning but still being genuinely lexical leads to some
interesting new accounts of well-known facts involving "pro forms" ('one',
'so') and expressions of predication structures ('be', 'with'). The account
crucially invokes and distinguishes several factors that can trigger the use
of these empty heads, including the need for a syntactic attachment site and
the need for clitics to be morphologically supported. Further factors come
into play to trigger insertion of 'be', and these factors are distinguished
from those that invoke dummy 'do', which is treated as of category Mood/Modal
rather than V, thereby capturing the intuition that both 'be' and 'do' are
dummies, but are not interchangeable.

4) The English auxiliary system. These are ideas that are like raw dough,
having not even risen for the first time yet, combined with aspects of the
account of the aux system in section 5.2 of my dissertation (which I believe
is the most detailed working out of that within DM). There are many pieces to
this story, of which I'll mention just a couple. One is to make crucial use of
the claim that external arguments are projected by a "little v" that heads a
syntactic projection higher than the object Case position. If verbs (V) have
to hook up with little v by overt head movement, we can explain many otherwise
paradoxical facts about the relative position of nonsubject NPs and verbs in
paradigms like "They had been forecasting a storm." vs. "There had been a
storm being forecast(ed)." I claim that "a storm" is in the same position in
both sentences, and that properties of v, V, and affixes arrange the various
participles around that position.  A second part of this story is the
treatment of (auxiliary) 'have' and 'be', which (following the aforementioned
paper) I view essentially as V heads with no semantic content. I think one can
argue that this tack provides an explanation for why just these two verbs can
"raise over negation" when finite in English--in fact, no verb can raise over
English Neg, but 'have' and 'be' can be "generated" above Neg when they are
finite, because of their semantic emptiness--an implication (with important
modifications) of Pollock's old idea.  The general picture that comes out of
this line of thinking is that English has way more V-raising than is generally
assumed. A side conclusion is that its impersonal passives (exemplified above)
are in no way weird, relative to other languages, contra what Chomsky has said
recently.

Thanks for listening!

----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------
Carson T. Schutze              Department of Linguistics, UCLA
Email: cschutze at ucla.edu       Box 951543, Los Angeles CA  90095-1543  U.S.A.

Office: Campbell Hall 2224B    Deliveries/Courier: 3125 Campbell Hall
Campus Mail Code: 154302       Web: http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/people/cschutze
Phone: (310)825-9887           Messages: (310)825-0634      Fax: (310)206-8595