36.743, Diss: Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian; Cognitive Science, Morphology, Syntax: Maša Bešlin: "Lexical categories, (re)categorization, and locality in morphosyntax"

Sat Mar 1 03:05:03 UTC 2025

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-743. Sat Mar 01 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.743, Diss: Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian; Cognitive Science, Morphology, Syntax: Maša Bešlin: "Lexical categories, (re)categorization, and locality in morphosyntax"

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Date: 01-Mar-2025
From: Maša Bešlin [mbeslin at umd.edu]
Subject: Cognitive Science, Morphology, Syntax; Lexical categories, (re)categorization, and locality in morphosyntax: Bešlin (2025)

Institution: University of Maryland
Degree Date: 2025

Dissertation Title: Lexical categories, (re)categorization, and
locality in morphosyntax

Dissertation URL: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/008838

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science
                     Morphology
                     Syntax

Subject Language(s): Bosnian (bos)
                     Croatian (hrv)
                     Serbian (srp)

Dissertation Director(s): Maria Polinsky, David Embick

Dissertation Abstract:

This dissertation is about the nature of syntactic primitives and
principles, their status in the grammar, and their interaction with
extra-linguistic cognition. The dissertation has two parts unified by
the common goal of streamlining the syntax by asking  whether some of
its proposed constructs are dispensable, whether the motivation for
their existence can be found syntax-externally, and whether they must
be assumed to be part of the initial state of the learner. While I
discuss a range of phenomena in a number of languages, core empirical
evidence throughout comes from adjectival derivation in
Bosnian/Croatian/ Serbian (BCS).
In the first part of the dissertation, I consider the status of
lexical categories (LCs) in grammar. I argue that LCs noun, verb, and
adjective are purely formal, abstract categories which have a
distributional role in the syntaxes of individual languages, but which
do not have a one-to-one mapping to any interpretive property. I argue
against proposals that attribute universal syntactic or semantic
properties to the specific LCs. In addition to discussing relevant
data from a variety of languages, I provide two detailed case studies
on mixed categories: passive and active
participles. I show that all participles in the languages under
discussion are in fact deverbal adjectives, in every syntactic
position they appear in andregardless of their interpretation. While
participles may denote (predicates of) properties or eventualities, I
argue that these different interpretations are not
cross-linguistically associated with more or less verbal or adjectival
structure. This reinforces the conclusion that a direct one-to-one
correspondence between an item’s LC and its interpretation does not
exist. If correct, this proposal has significant consequences for our
understanding of Universal Grammar. If there are no universal
syntactic or semantic properties we can attribute to the LCs, then it
becomes superfluous to assume that the individual LCs are part of the
initial state of the learner. I propose that the cross-linguistic
tendencies we observe around LCs may stem from the way non-linguistic
knowledge is organized in the mind/brain.
In the second part of the dissertation, I turn my attention to the
formal principles that operate on grammatical primitives, asking
specifically what kinds of locality constraints are employed by the
grammar. While locality has been extensively studied in generative
linguistics, the current offering of locality theories is arbitrary,
redundant, baroque, and/or empirically inadequate. There are in
essence three competing locality theories currently in circulation
within the field: Featural Relativized Minimality (FRM), Phase theory
as currently understood in the syntax literature (where it is a
successor of Subjacency), and Phase theory as understood in the
context of Distributed Morphology (DM). Despite recent attempts to
devise a single, unified Phase theory which is responsible for both
syntax-internal locality and interface locality, I argue on both
conceptual and empirical grounds that the unification is unfeasible.
In a detailed empirical study of deadjectival derivation in BCS, I
show that adjectivization imposes a DM-locality boundary (for
allomorphy and morphological tone assignment), but not a ‘big
syntax’-locality boundary (for punctuated movement paths).
Nonetheless, I show that the original inventory of locality principles
can be reduced if we assume that (i) syntax-internal locality is
regulated by FRM, and (ii) interface locality is regulated by
Transfer, a modified version of Phase theory which has no
syntax-internal effects. I reinterpret the evidence supporting Phase
theory through the lens of FRM and demonstrate that the division of
labor in (i)-(ii) not only achieves the right empirical cut, but
alsooffers insight into why the grammar may require two distinct
locality principles.

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