<OT> papers on morphosyntax

[bresnan at stanford.edu]

I've placed the following two papers as postscript files for download
from my website at

http://www-csli.stanford.edu/users/bresnan/download.html.

1.  The Emergence of the Unmarked Pronoun II.  Paper presented at the
Hopkins Optimality Theory Workshop/Maryland Mayfest 1997, Inner
Harbor, Baltimore, Maryland, May 9-12. 34 pages.  

In this paper, revising and elaborating Bresnan 1997 (BLS), I attempt
to construct a morphosyntactic theory of pronominal markedness that
can explain (i) a universal markedness asymmetry in pronoun
inventories--that some languages lack bound pronouns or zero pronouns
or both, but no languages lack free pronouns, (ii) the recurrent
pronominal system of pidgins of typologically diverse sources, and
(iii) emergence effects in which a free pronoun ordinarily used for
focus can play a topic-anaphoric role just where a bound or zero
pronominal is missing.  Pronouns in this theory are represented as
pairings of structural types (drawn from the series Zero, Bound,
Clitic, Weak, and Free) with feature structures representing
pronominal content in a form-independent way, using modern
feature-logic based theories of morphosyntax (LFG).  OT constraints are
derived from work in natural syntax (Haiman 1985) and functional
typology.  I critically discuss claims for the existence of languages
without free pronouns.

2.  The revised version (January 14, 1998) of Explaining
Morphosyntactic Competition - written for the Handbook of Contemporary
Syntactic Theory, ed. by Baltin and Collins, to be published by
Blackwell.  42 pages.

Comments are very welcome.

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Joan Bresnan	bresnan at stanford.edu           ______     _`\<,_    _`\<,_
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