Morphosyntactic property sets at the interface of inflectional morphology, syntax and semantics

Abstract

The morphosyntactic property set associated with the syntactic node occupied by a word form is not invariably identical to the property set determining that word form’s inflection, as evidence from Bhojpuri, Turkish, Sanskrit and Hua shows. The difference between syntactic property sets and their corresponding morphological property sets may be represented as a property mapping relating two different kinds of paradigm: a lexeme L’s content paradigm specifies the range of property sets with which L may be associated in syntax ; its form paradigm specifies the (sometimes distinct) property sets that determine L’s inflectional realization. Thus, a language’s inflectional morphology doesn’t merely specify the realization of paradigm cells: it also specifies the sometimes nontrivial linkage of content with form at the interface of syntax and semantics with morphology.