Karlos Arregi

Stress-by-Structure in Spanish

In this article, we argue for a syntactic approach to the computation of stress in Spanish. Our basic claim is that stress placement in this language makes crucial reference to the internal syntactic structure of words. In particular, we propose that foot boundaries are projected from certain functional heads. The analysis is set within the framework of Distributed Morphology and uses the formalism of the bracketed grid for the representation of stress. Several hypotheses concerning the syntax of words are argued to be necessary in gaining a better understanding of stress placement in Spanish.

Clausal Pied-Piping

In Basque, wh-movement can pied-pipe an entire clause. The surface syntax of clausal pied-piping structures suggests that their syntax and semantics should be similar to scope marking constructions as analyzed in the Indirect Dependency approach. However, data having to do with presupposition projection and the interpretation of how many-questions show that clausal pied-piping structures are actually more similar to their long-distance wh-movement counterparts than to scope marking constructions. I develop an analysis which takes into account these facts. Specifically, I show that pied-piped clauses must reconstruct, which makes the correct prediction that clausal pied-piping, unlike long-distance wh-movement, is sensitive to negative islands. Finally, I propose that reconstruction is forced by a condition on the interpretation of traces.

Agreement and Clitic Restrictions in Basque

The -features of ergative, absolutive, and dative arguments interact in various ways in the clitic and agreement system of the Basque finite auxiliary. In this paper, we discuss the syntax and morphology of agreement realization in a detailed study of the Bizkaian variety of Zamudio. Our main objective is to argue that the proper treatment of Basque verbal morphology must take into account both syntactic and postsyntactic principles and operations. That is, neither a strictly syntactic nor a strictly morphological account does justice to the clitic combination and agreement restriction effects. Rather, as certain processes refer to hierarchical structure and doubly-filled projections, and others refer to locality constraints on agreement at a distance, yet others refer to linear edge properties of morphophonological sensitivity and deletion of featural combinations, the division of labor for building and realizing the agreement morphology must be distributed, as delineated in the framework of Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993, 1994, and much subsequent work). Crucial to the discussion will be the claim that, contrary to the dominant viewpoint in the literature, the morphemes attached to the auxiliary that are often identified as agreement are actually clitics that double the ergative, absolutive, and dative arguments. Such a view is supported by the reanalysis it enables for the Person Case Constraint (PCC) in Basque, as well as providing a principled account for the distribution of plural enclisis. Importantly, however, we argue that the auxiliary does manifest a single instance of syntactic Agree, with the absolutive argument. We show that this Agree operation may be subject to defective intervention in the context of dative arguments, leading to lack of agreement. The resulting model illustrates a dissociation in the effects of dative arguments on absolutive encoding, with distinct mechanisms for competition in clitic positions and locality-based agreement intervention. Previous work on Basque verbal morphology addressing these issues in the generative framework typically does not concentrate on any local varieties of the language (though see Rezac 2006). However, we believe that sig-

A monoradical approach to some cases of disuppletion

Abstract This paper, a commentary on Harley 2014, explores cases of disuppletive roots, such as destroy/destruct, persons/people, and worse/badder, the predominant approach to which is to assume that these come from different roots. We adopt a monoradical approach to such cases, claiming that they always involve the same root, but that the suppletive allomorphy is conditioned by the presence or absence of additional functional heads in the structure. We also posit that defective verbs in Spanish, an extreme case of disuppletion (whereby one of the exponents of this root is ineffable), receive a straightforward analysis as a case of contextually limited allomorphy, following Harleys postulate that certain formatives may have no elsewhere item on either the LF or the PF side (the Encyclopedic List and the Exponent List, respectively).

Introduction: The Structure of Spellout

This chapter introduces the book by providing a summary of its major claims: that word-formation is derived through a principled order of morphological operations organized within modular components, that morphotactics enjoys structural parallelism with phonotactics, and that the ‘Distributed’ of Distributed Morphology is its key insight. The chapter provides an overview of the Basque language and the three dialectal varieties around which the analysis is developed, along with an introduction to argument structure, case assignment, and verbal syntax in the language.

Beware Occam’s Syntactic Razor: Morphotactic Analysis and Spanish Mesoclisis

Harris and Halle (2005) present a framework (Generalized Reduplication) that unites the treatment of phonological reduplication and metathesis with similar phenomena in morphology, thereby accounting for the apparently spurious placement of the imperative plural -n in mesoclitic Spanish forms such as hága-lo-n ‘Do it!’, in which clitic lo is sandwiched between the verbal stem and the plural suffix. Kayne (2010) has challenged their analysis, arguing that such cases should be treated purely within the syntax. We reassess some of Kayne’s arguments, agreeing with his conclusion that the most important desideratum of any general analysis of such phenomena is restrictiveness. However, we contend that greater restrictiveness can be achieved through morphotactic constraints and repairs in the Generalized Reduplication formalism, triggered by a Noninitiality constraint on the positioning of the plural affix, and we develop constraints on these operations that situate interspeaker variation within the postsyntactic component.

The Morphophonology of Basque Finite Auxiliaries

This chapter provides an in-depth look at the morphophonology of the auxiliaries, focusing on Fission, vocabulary entries for the auxiliary root, and phonological rules affecting the underlying form of auxiliaries. The chapter presents novel revisions to the mechanisms of Fission and Vocabulary Insertion proposed within earlier work on Distributed Morphology. It also contains argumentation to the effect that Basque has no third person absolutive clitics, a fact that has many consequences outside of the non-realization of this particular expected element. The chapter also includes a discussion of plural morphology within the Basque auxiliary, with an emphasis on decomposing apparent cases of multiple exponence into independent morphemes, each of which carries its own particularities of distribution. The core of the chapter is devoted to developing explicit analyses of all aspects of Vocabulary Insertion affecting the form of the root in Lekeito, Ondarru, and Zamudio, with an eye towards highlighting key points of convergence and divergence in terms of their exponents according to agreement features, tense, and argument structure, and contains a complete analysis of all phonological rules applying to the auxiliaries under study.

The Syntax of Cliticization and Agreement

This chapter is devoted to the syntactic operations that generate the Basque auxiliary word and other finite verbs. It contains proposals for the structure for Basque finite CPs and mechanisms of Head Movement and cliticization that bring together distinct syntactic terminals into a single morphological word (M-word). A syntax for clitics is proposed in terms of a big-DP structure, in which they originate within the base structure of the syntactic argument to which they correspond. The mechanism of Agree is exemplified for the feature-valuation relationship between T(ense) and absolutive and dative arguments, implemented in terms of syntactic establishment of the relation (Agree-Link), and postsyntactic implementation of feature value copying from Goal to Probe (Agree-Copy). The existence of an apparent Person Case Constraint in Basque is derived as a consequence of the way that cliticization works and in terms of minimality-based competition for clitic host positions, and we discuss a syntactic repair mechanism, Absolutive Promotion, applying within limited environments. The chapter also analyzes complementizer agreement, found at the right edge of the auxiliary word complex, and distinct from the distribution of number marking realized via tense or pronominal clitics.

Deletion Operations Targeting Morphological Markedness

This chapter focuses on the interaction of morphological markedness constraints with the feature-deletion and terminal-deletion operations of Impoverishment and Obliteration. We examine both context-free markedness (the marked value of a particular binary feature) and context-sensitive markedness (the marked combination of certain feature-values in the presence of others). A large part of the chapter is devoted to an exemplification of Participant Dissimilation, a process of morphological dissimilation based on multiple instances of the feature [ + participant] in the same M-word. We argue for a general constraint, found across many Biscayan dialects, that bans the co-occurrence of first plural clitics and second person clitics within the same finite verb, but that each dialect may impose additional subcondition and enacts separate repairs in terms of deletion operations of Participant Dissimilation. We exemplify the distinction between Impoverishment and Obliteration through an examination of their effects on the allomorph selection between transitive and intransitive auxiliary roots. This chapter also presents an analysis of the phenomenon of Plural Clitic Impoverishment, whereby the number distinction on absolutive and dative clitics is neutralized in the context of a particular type of ergative clitic. The deletion phenomena in this chapter exemplify some of the procedures recurrently found during the participation of the Feature Markedness module in the Spellout of the Basque auxiliary.

Linearity-Based Morphotactics

Second position (or Noninitiality) effects (Wackernagel 1892; Halpern and Zwicky 1996; Anderson 2005) in which a particular category avoids the leftmost edge of some domain, occur in a wide range of clausal contexts, yielding both V2 phenomena in Germanic and second position clitics in South Slavic, to name but a few well-known cases. In this chapter, we consider an extension of the general phenomenon of edge-related constraints to the domain of word-internal morphotactics, focusing on the repair strategies of morphological Metathesis, of Doubling, and of epenthesis of expletive-like elements. The proposal that second position effects may occur within the word-domain has been explored to some extent in Nevis and Joseph (1992), Embick and Noyer (2001) and Anderson (2005), and we further expand their empirical terrain with in-depth case studies of linear phenomena in the Basque auxiliary. One of the key repair strategies treated herein is displacement of the ergative clitic to the left of the root (otherwise expected as an enclitic), a phenomenon dubbed Ergative Displacement in Laka (1993a), which we call here Ergative Metathesis in an attempt to subsume it under other morpheme displacement phenomena crosslinguistically. We argue that Ergative Metathesis is a morphological metathetic operation, and is demonstrably postsyntactic, operating on a linearized sequence of morphemes.