synthetic/periphrastic alternation

[John Frampton]

> ... hi all! I haven't read any of the relevant stuff by stump&ackerman,
> or you, John, but I'm having trouble perceiving the issue raised by the
> allomorphy/suppletion cases you're describing below.
>
> You wrote:
>
>  In what is called the first-past tense, for example, negated
>  verbs are much like "didn't forms" in English, with an auxiliary
>  verb bearing inflection and negation and the verb root standing
>  apart.  The problem is that there are two forms of the root, one
>  of which is used in the 3pl and the other elsewhere.  The problem
>  is to account for the dependence of root allomorphy (or
>  readjustment, or suffixation, or whatever) on agreement, which is
>  attached to a different word.
>
> I don't see why, within DM, it should matter whether a conditioning
> feature for allomorphy/suppletion/readjustment, etc., is within the
> same phonological word or not. What should matter is that the feature
> be sufficiently syntactically local for the relevant insertion or
> readjustment rule to 'see'. Allomorphy/suppletion/readjustment of a
> verb stem in the context of a subject agreement feature, doesn't seem
> too strange to me, whether the verb stem is actually affixed to the
> tense/agr head or not, and even if a negation head intervenes
> structurally.

> What such facts DO bear on, I think, is the issue of how big the
> locality domain that a VI can be sensitive to is. Is it just string- or
> tree-adjacent features/material? Is it any features anywhere in its
> extended projection (or phase)? Is it any features upwards in the tree
> but not downwards? Is it features of heads but not features of phrases?
> etc. (See, e.g., JDB's 2000 Itelmen allomorphy paper for the Maryland
> Morphology Mayfest). This is clearly an empirical issue, whose answer
> should be determined by looking cross-linguistically at facts like
> these -- but I don't see anything about the architecture of DM that
> will preclude a treatment of these facts. Indeed, since DM is an
> explicitly post-syntactic theory of morphology, I would think that we'd
> have a better shot at it than pre-syntactic theories, which might have
> a problem getting featural info from one item to affect an item in a
> different phonological word before the syntax has introduced the first
> item's featural info into the structure.
>
> But perhaps I'm missing something? Is there some part of the problem I'm
> not percieving?

No, you are not missing anything.  I took it as a given that we would
like vocabulary items to have highly local context conditions on their
use--- restricted to the syntactic word in which the features they
realize appear.

- John Frampton