From cschutze at UCLA.EDU Sat Mar 8 05:23:36 2003 From: cschutze at UCLA.EDU (Carson Schutze) Date: Fri, 7 Mar 2003 21:23:36 -0800 Subject: references on ineffability as conflicting forms Message-ID: Hi everyone, This is a citation question, not intended to open an issue for debate (though of course if people feel like debating it that could always be fun). Some DMers have claimed in talks that one way (perhaps the only way?) in which a generally non-filtering morphological component can induce ineffability is by an unresolvable conflict between output forms. A classic case of what is meant by this can be seen in German free relatives, as discussed by Taraldsen a couple of decades ago, and analyzed by Uli Sauerland in an MIT ms. in the mid-90s. Ich zerstoere *wer/*wen/was mich aergert. I destroy *who-nom/*who-acc/what-nom~acc me upsets That is, the matrix clause wants the wh-word to be ACC while the embedded clause wants it to be NOM, a conflict that is intolerable unless the relevant NOM and ACC forms happen to be homophonous. So, my literature questions are 1) is there any DM work that has claimed in print that this is the only kind of ineffability there is? 2) are there any known cases where this kind of pattern has been claimed to arise as the result of a verb having to agree with two different NPs? 3) is there any literature that ought to be cited offering plausible arguments *against* the spirit of this analysis for cases of the German type above or something similar, i.e. that a conflict between two surface forms is not at the heart of the problem? (Uli's actual account was not quite as I described it above, rather he had two separate NP positions and a rule that could delete one of the wh-phrases just in case it was phonologically identical to the other; I take that as in the same spirit as the above.) Thanks! Carson From cschutze at UCLA.EDU Sat Mar 8 05:23:36 2003 From: cschutze at UCLA.EDU (Carson Schutze) Date: Fri, 7 Mar 2003 21:23:36 -0800 Subject: references on ineffability as conflicting forms Message-ID: Hi everyone, This is a citation question, not intended to open an issue for debate (though of course if people feel like debating it that could always be fun). Some DMers have claimed in talks that one way (perhaps the only way?) in which a generally non-filtering morphological component can induce ineffability is by an unresolvable conflict between output forms. A classic case of what is meant by this can be seen in German free relatives, as discussed by Taraldsen a couple of decades ago, and analyzed by Uli Sauerland in an MIT ms. in the mid-90s. Ich zerstoere *wer/*wen/was mich aergert. I destroy *who-nom/*who-acc/what-nom~acc me upsets That is, the matrix clause wants the wh-word to be ACC while the embedded clause wants it to be NOM, a conflict that is intolerable unless the relevant NOM and ACC forms happen to be homophonous. So, my literature questions are 1) is there any DM work that has claimed in print that this is the only kind of ineffability there is? 2) are there any known cases where this kind of pattern has been claimed to arise as the result of a verb having to agree with two different NPs? 3) is there any literature that ought to be cited offering plausible arguments *against* the spirit of this analysis for cases of the German type above or something similar, i.e. that a conflict between two surface forms is not at the heart of the problem? (Uli's actual account was not quite as I described it above, rather he had two separate NP positions and a rule that could delete one of the wh-phrases just in case it was phonologically identical to the other; I take that as in the same spirit as the above.) Thanks! Carson