Neil Myler / The Princess and the P
Neil Myler / The Princess and the P
Friday October 13, Neil Myler joins us from Boston University to present his work on morphosyntax and the Mirror Principle - according to which "Morphological derivations must directly reflect syntactic derivations and vice versa" (Baker 1985) - at the our department Colloquium, followed by our Friday reception. An abstract follows.
The Princess and the P
Interactions between causative and applicative morphemes have been a source of interest and despair for generative linguists since at least the days of Relational Grammar (see, for example, Kimenyi 1980:Section 7.3.2). A strong prediction concerning such interactions emerges from the tradition associated with Pylkkänen (2002/2008) (See also McGinnis 2008:1239), as follows:
(1) Phase-selecting causatives should be able to embed High Applicatives, but verb-selecting causatives should be unable to.
In this talk, I will show that there are counter-examples to (1) in both directions: (i) isiXhosa is a language with a verb-selecting causative which can embed High Appl, and (ii) some Quechua varieties have a phase-selecting causative which cannot embed High Appl. Focusing on the Quechua cases, I will propose that a solution lies in a combination of (a) the old idea that some instances of Appl are in fact tiny light verbs, whereas others are in fact tiny adpositions (see, for example, Legate 2001; Baker 1996:Section 9.3), and (b) a version of Wood and Marantz’s (2017) i* proposal. Since i* inherits category features from its complement, higher heads (like a phase-selecting causative) can be sensitive to the presence of a P buried under it.