Roots, their structure and consequences for derivational timing

Abstract

Recent work in Distributed Morphology, most prominently Harley (2014), argues for roots being able to take syntactic complements, which opens the door for the possibility of having syntactic features within a root’s representation – something most DM literature rejects (Embick 2015). Upon a closer inspection of the arguments presented in the literature, it is not clear whether the disagreement has an empirical underpinning, or whether it stems from the lack of methodological clarity as far as the identification of the precise nature of what constitutes a syntactic feature. This paper takes this methodological question seriously and investigates a type of derivational behavior that, in our view, provides a decisive argument for the presence of syntactic features on roots. We argue that the presence of a syntactic feature on the root can be conclusively established based on a feature’s impact on specific properties within a larger syntactic structure. Based on empirical evidence form gender agreement phenomena, we introduce a model of grammar that distinguishes roots with syntactic features from those which do not have them. We propose that such a distinction between roots will manifest itself in the timing of root insertion – roots without syntactic features are late inserted, while roots with syntactic features must be early inserted.

Between pronouns and R-expressions: Pronoun-like lexical noun phrases

“…For concreteness we assume that the first step of the derivation creates a derivational workspace, that is, an empty set as a placeholder for late insertion of a root (see, e.g., De Belder and van Craenenbroeck 2015 and Kučerová and Szczegielniak 2019). This placeholder merges with a nominalizing functional head ( n ) which creates a nominal root structure.…”

“…director.M.SG'). We refer the reader toKučerová (2018) for a discussion of similar cases in Italian andKučerová and Szczegielniak (2019) for a discussion of mixed nominal agreement patterns in Polish. Following these accounts, we assume that this type of morphologically masculine noun comes with an unvalued gender feature from the lexicon, which becomes subject to an interface valuation.…”

Polish politeness markers as a window into person-feature valuation

“…We argue that in this case we see the morphologically masculine form as a realization of a syntactically unvalued gender feature, and the feminine marking arises via means parallel to those explored in this paper. For a more detailed discussion, including why the reversed, i.e., a feminine head noun and a masculine modifier, is not possible see Kučerová (2018) for Italian and Kučerová & Szczegielniak (2019) for gender mismatch limitations in the nominal domain for Polish.…”