Heidi Harley: Word formation constraints (reply to Dan Everett)

[Martha McGinnis]

Hi all --

well, I'll take a stab at it, without having thought about it very much.
These are certainly thornily tricky constructions... pls consider the following
to be just the naivest possible response.

>The relevance to DM, as I see it,
>is knowing how DM could generate these, what Andrew calls, 'phrasal'
>words. If the only means of word-formation are Vocabulary Item insertion
>and Head Movement, then I cannot see how phrasal words can be formed.

why not allow the syntax to generate phrases and merge them in 'head'
positions,
with permission slips for such activity issued on a language-by-language,
construction-by-construction basis (e.g. via varying what types of categories
can bear certain types of features)? As Dan notes, this is essentially what
Andrew Carnie argued for Irish nominal predicates in his thesis. The hard
problem for such a proposal is figuring out how to constrain it, of course,
but letting the syntax generate phrases seems natural enough -- it's what
it does. the trick is letting it do it in certain head positions.

Then, presumably, vocab. insertion will proceed as usual, and phrasal phonology
will as well, and you end up with a syntactically complex item that is doing
the job of a 'word'.

Note that DM has an advantage if this is really a possible account of such
constructions, since it's a Late Insertion theory: the syntax can do all
the dirty work and you don't have to replicate overtly phrasal syntactic
rules in the lexicon just to construct these complex phrase-words.

>If
>that is correct, then DM would thus still be bound by a rather strong
>version of the 'Lexicalist Hypothesis'.

if i'm saying a reasonable thing, then it won't be so bound.

>I am betting that DM has no easy
>solution and that the problem will turn out to be the exocentricity of
>phrasal words. That is, the immediate constituent of a 'phrasal word'
>doesn't match the label of the category under which it occurs in the tree
>(a sentence in Adjective position, for example will provoke severe
>complications in explaining how it got there)

right -- but i'm guessing that's a syntactic problem, not a morphological
one.

>The specific problem I have in mind comes from Wari' quotatives, in which
>the quotative phrase functions as the verb of the sentence. This is
>documented in my chapter in the Handbook of Morphology and also in the
>Everett & Kern grammar of Wari from Routledge. There is strong evidence
>in Wari, however, that not even Carnie's proposal (form a phrase and move
>it into X0) will work, since movement is fairly carefully marked in Wari,
>but quotatives show no signs of movement.

I don't actually think that Carnie's proposal is that a phrase "moves into"
an X0 slot and hence becomes an X0-- rather, the whole phrase, he says,
_behaves_ like it's dominated by an X0 right from the get go (that is, the
whole predicative NP bears verbal features). Then the whole thing head-moves
to check those features, just like a regular V0 in Irish. But it's the fact
that the nominal predicate can _bear_ such features in base position that
allows the nominal predicate to head-move.

so my guess is that movement isn't crucial: you ought to be able to generate
a phrase that bears head features and have it merged into the syntactic
structure just as if it was a word. i'll check with Andrew, who I don't
think is a list member, and see if he can clarify a bit.

>I am sure that this is all too sketchy to make a great deal of. But I am
>hoping to finish a paper on this in the next few weeks. The problem seems
>to be the need to recognize exocentric constructions motivated directly
>by the semantics, both requirements hard to state in formal theories (like
>DM). Well, anyway, that is what the paper claims. More on that when it is
>available.

looking forward to it!




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Heidi Harley
Department of Linguistics
Douglass 200E
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721
Ph: (520) 626-3554
Fax: (520) 626-9014
hharley at u.arizona.edu