Boris Harizanov

Word Formation at the Syntax-Morphology Interface: Denominal Adjectives in Bulgarian

A major goal in the study of the interface between syntax and morphology (understood as part of the PF component) is to understand mismatches between syntactic representations and the corresponding morphological representations. Denominal adjectives in Bulgarian provide one such mismatch. In morphology, they are composed of a nominal component D adjoined to an adjectivizing head F. In syntax, however, the nominal component D behaves like a nominal phrase occupying the specifier of F. Denominal adjectives in Bulgarian thus present both a structural mismatch whereby a syntactic specifier-head relation is mapped to head adjunction at PF and a mismatch between the syntactic and morphological category of denominal adjectives. I analyze these mismatches as the result of a morphological (postsyntactic) operation, which converts nominal phrases into denominal adjectives postsyntactically, as part of the word formation process that combines the nominal phrases with adjectivizing morphology. The proposal is an extension of the theory of the syntax-morphology mapping developed within Distributed Morphology (Embick and Noyer 2001, et seq.) on the basis of Marantz’s (1984) Morphological Merger and relies on the implementation of Morphological Merger developed by Harizanov (2014a) in the context of cliticization, itself an elaboration of Matushansky’s (2006) and Nevins’s (2011) proposals.

Prosodic Smothering in Macedonian and Kaqchikel

This article deals with a so-far unnoticed phenomenon in prosodic phonology, which we dub prosodic smothering. Prosodic smothering arises when the prosodic status of a clitic or affix varies with the presence or absence of some outer morpheme. We first illustrate prosodic smothering with novel data from two genetically unrelated languages, Macedonian (Slavic) and Kaqchikel (Mayan). We then provide a unified account of prosodic smothering based on a principled extension of the theory of prosodic subcategorization (e.g., Inkelas 1990, Peperkamp 1997, Chung 2003, Yu 2003, Paster 2006, Bye 2007). Prosodic subcategorization typically involves requirements placed on items to the left or the right of the selecting morpheme. We show that prosodic smothering naturally emerges in a theory that also allows for subcategorization in the vertical dimension, such that morphemes may select for the prosodic category that immediately dominates them in surface prosodic structure. This extension successfully reduces two apparent cases of nonlocal prosodic conditioning to the effects of strictly local prosodic selection.