Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy: zero affixes again

[Martha McGinnis]

Date: Tue, 23 Feb 1999 13:06:22 +1300
From: Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy <a.carstairs-mccarthy at LING.CANTERBURY.AC.NZ>
Subject: zero affixes again

Here is a rejoinder to Morris Halle's reply to my posting 'Zero affixes in DM'.

In that posting I expressed unease about the positing of a zero affix in
the DM analysis of past tense forms such as _cut, sang_ and past participle
forms such as _cut, sung, come_.  Halle does not succeed in allaying my
unease, for three reasons:
1.  His reply relies on confusing two senses of the term 'morpheme'.  Both
of these senses are sanctioned in DM, but to my mind this is unfortunate,
because it risks giving rise to just the kind of confusion that undermines
Halle's argument (I suggest).
2.  He fails to address the peculiar phonological restrictions on those
past and past participle verb forms that allegedly carry the zero affix.
3.  He offers no evidence that the advantages of rejecting the zero-affix
analysis for these verb forms are spurious or illusory.

1.  The two senses of 'morpheme'

In DM a distinction is drawn, wisely, between morphosyntactic feature
bundles and the Vocabulary items that may express them.  A Vocabulary item
has in principle a phonological shape (even though for some items this may
be zero); a morphosyntactic feature, or bundle of features, does not.
Also, one bundle of features may be expressed by different Vocabulary items
in different contexts.  So which, if either, of these kinds of thing is a
morpheme, according to DM?  The answer is that *both* kinds of thing count
as morphemes.  As Halle and Marantz put it (1993:114): 'we have chosen to
call the terminal elements "morphemes" both before and after Vocabulary
insertion, that is, before and after they are supplied with phonological
features'.  Thus, apparently, we are entitled to say that _waited_ and
_given_ display different past participle morphemes because their affixes
are different, but also that they display the same morpheme because both
these affixes realize [past participle].

Halle and Marantz claim that nothing hinges on this terminology.  However,
it undermines what Halle sees as the clinching argument for zero affixes in
English verbs, namely the argument from do-support.  The argument runs like
this.  In yes-no question contexts, lexical verbs cannot carry Tense-Number
marking; this marking must instead be realized on the dummy verb _do_, as
in:
(1)  Doe-s John snore?
(2)  Di-d John snore?
But this _do_ shows up even when the Tense-Number features in question are
[non-3rd-singular present]:
(3)  Do they snore?
So, even though [non-3rd-singular present] is never phonologically overt in
any context, it must be realized by a zero affix in order to trigger
do-support.  In Morphological Structure, therefore, (3) is a better
represented as (4):
(4)  Do-0 they snore?

This argument fails because it relies on a blurring of the distinction
between morpheme-as-feature-bundle and morpheme-as-affix.  One may agree
that a feature bundle needs a peg on which to get realized, without
agreeing that the realization must inevitably be carried out by a
morpheme-as-affix.  To substantiate the claim that a zero morpheme-as-affix
is present in (3) (or (4)), Halle needs to do more than just invoke the
phenomenon of do-support.  The fact that he does not do more is at least
partly due, I suggest, to DM's use of the term 'morpheme' to designate both
syntactic terminal elements (feature bundles) and also affixes.  Let us
grant that the morpheme-as-feature-bundle [non-3rd-singular present]
occupies a terminal position in a syntactic tree.  It does not follow that
there must be an independent Vocabulary item (a morpheme-as-affix) to
realize it -- unless of course the theory of DM decrees that such a
Vocabulary item *must* exist, thanks to the two-sided character ascribed in
the theory to 'morphemes'.  But in that case the postulation of a zero
affix for the purpose seems no more than a trick to reconcile the theory
with recalcitrant data.

It is important to stress the difference between the zero morphological
realization of [non-3rd-singular present] and the alleged zero affix for
[past].  The feature [past] is uncontroversially realized by an affix in
most contexts: _snored, sold, felt_ etc.  The postulation of a zero affix
in _sang, cut_ etc. therefore seems less contrived than in examples (3) and
(4).  Even so, the facts of do-support in the past tense count *against*
the existence of a [past] zero affix, not for it.  Remember that what is at
issue is not whether features such as [past] need a peg on which to get
realized; rather, the issue is whether this realization ever takes the form
of a zero affix.  Imagine an imaginary English in which the yes-no
questions corresponding to (5) and (6) were not (7) and (8) but rather (9)
and (10):
(5)  John left.
(6)  John sang.
(7)  Did John leave?
(8)  Did John sing?
(9)  Di-t John leave?
(10)  Di John sing?
In this version of English, it is clearly not just the feature [past] that
gets supported by _do_, but the actual affix that realizes [past] on the
accompanying lexical verb in positive declarative contexts.  In this
version of English, the past tense of _do_ will usually carry an affix
(_-d_ or _-t_), so one could reasonably argue that in (6) and (10) too
there is an affix, albeit a phonologically null one.  The forms _sang_ and
_di_ would therefore be more accurately represented in Morphological
Structure as _sang-0_ and _di-0_.  But actual English is not like this.
The fact that the dummy _do_ shows up as _did_ in both (7) and (8),
ignoring the morphology of the lexical verbs in (5) and (6), shows
conclusively that do-support operates at the level of morphosyntactic
features, not at the level of the affixes that realize them.  This further
weakens the case for invoking a zero affix in a [non-3rd-singular present]
context such as (3).

2.  The phonological restrictions on the past (participle) 'zero affixes'

Halle points out correctly that, in the DM analysis, both overt affixes and
zero affixes may or may not trigger readjustments.  As he puts it: "As Past
exponent, zero sometimes causes phonetic modifications in the stem to which
it attaches, sometimes not.  In this again zeros parallel other Past tense
exponents".  He also provides a list of verbs in which an (alleged) zero
Past exponent causes no phonetic modification, namely _beat, shed, cast,
burst, hurt, rid, spread_.   But he does not comment on the striking fact
that all these verbs end in in coronal stops.  If one rejects the DM
analysis for these forms, plausible avenues for explanation open up:
perhaps these forms have an underlying overt coronal suffix, forming a
cluster that gets simplified, or perhaps they have no suffix at all (even a
zero one) because they already conform to a past-tense template.  Under the
DM analysis, however, no such explanation seems available.  Why should the
zero affix without readjustment favor precisely coronal stems, rather than
(say) bilabial ones, or disyllabic ones, or ones with high vowels?  Halle
does not say.

Likewise, Halle does not say why, for Past Participle, the zero affix
without readjustment is limited precisely to these coronal stems plus also
_run_ and _come_ -- a pair of verbs whose vowel complies with the pattern
of _sung, struck, dug_ etc.  The fact that all this seems to be relegated
to mere coincidence in Halle's DM analysis must surely count against it.

3.  Positive evidence for the nonaffixal character of stem alternations

Does stem alternation play by the same rules as affixal allomorphy, or by
different rules, or by no rules at all (as might be expected if it is
merely the random residue of phonological change)?  Under DM, much stem
alternation is handled by readjustment, sometimes triggered by zero
affixes.  It will therefore count in favor of DM if stem alternation plays
by substantially the same rules as affixal allomorphy does: that is, if it
is found that the zeroes that one posits to trigger stem modifications obey
any constraints or restrictions that affect overt affixes, and that there
are no special constraints on the stem modifications themselves.  Evidence
on these lines, if sufficiently substantial, could even outweigh the doubts
I have expressed about zero affixes in English verbforms.

In fact, however, such evidence as I am aware of points firmly the other
way, i.e. towards the conclusion that stem alternation plays by different
rules than affixal allomorphy.  I have in mind the following:
(a)  stem alternation is irrelevant for the purpose of 'paradigm economy'
(Carstairs 1987:221-32; 1988) and 'blur avoidance' (Carstairs-McCarthy
1994);
(b)  patterns of stem alternation can be productive, independently of the
phonological shape of the alternants (Maiden 1992; 1996), in line with the
view of stems as part of 'morphology by itself' (Aronoff 1994);
(c)  implicative paradigm structure conditions of the kind proposed in
Natural Morphology by Wurzel (1984) and applied to German verbs by Bittner
(1985) are too powerful a mechanism to account for affixal 'blur avoidance'
(Carstairs-McCarthy 1994:754-7), but seem well suited to describing
observed patterns of stem distribution (Carstairs-McCarthy 1991:237-47).

I would welcome debate on whether these observations can be reconciled with
DM.  For the time being, they seem to count against too ready reliance on
affixation plus readjustment in order to handle stem allomorphy.

Aronoff, M.  1994.  Morphology by itself.  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bittner, A.  1985.  Implikative Hierarchien in der Morphologie: Das
'Stark-schwach-Kontinuum' der neuhochdeutschen Verben.  Acta Linguistica
Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 35:31-42.
Carstairs, A.  1987.  Allomorphy in inflexion.  London: Croom Helm.
Carstairs, A.  1988.  Nonconcatenative inflection and paradigm economy.
Theoretical morphology: approaches in modern linguistics, ed. by M. Hammond
and M. Noonan, 71-7.  San Diego: Academic Press.
Carstairs-McCarthy, A.  1991.  Inflection classes: two questions with one
answer.  Paradigms: the economy of inflection, ed. by F. Plank, 213-53.
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Carstairs-McCarthy, A.  1994.  Inflection classes, gender and the Principle
of Contrast.  Language 70:737-88.
Maiden, M.  1992.  Irregularity as a determinant of morphological change.
Journal of Linguistics 28:285-312.
Maiden, M.  1996.  The Romance gerund and 'system-dependent naturalness' in
morphology.  Transactions of the Philological Society 94:167-201.
Wurzel, W.U.  1984.  Flexionsmorphologie und Natuerlichkeit.  Berlin:
Akademie-Verlag.  (English translation (1989): Inflectional morphology and
naturalness.  Dordrecht: Kluwer.)

Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy
Associate Professor
Department of Linguistics, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800,
Christchurch, New Zealand
phone (work) +64-3-364 2211; (home) +64-3-355 5108
fax +64-3-364 2969
e-mail a.c-mcc at ling.canterbury.ac.nz
http://www.ling.canterbury.ac.nz/adc-m.html