references on ineffability as conflicting forms

[Martha McGinnis]

By the way... I never responded to this message from Carson.  (I'm on
sabbatical!)

(1) Rolf Noyer has done a fair amount of work on types of
morphological blocking, of which this kind of ineffability is one.
Maybe he can answer this one.

(2) Maybe me-lui effects?  These have sometimes been described as a
conflict between a need for direct object agreement/clitics to appear
on a verb, and the blocking effect of indirect object
agreement/clitics.

(3) No idea.

Best,
Martha


>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


--
mcginnis at ucalgary.ca