Download Morphemes in Competition

Morphemes in Competition
Complementarity effects in which specific items or rules supersede general ones are ubiquitous in
phonology (the Elsewhere Condition), morphology (blocking), syntax (e.g. in many formulations of Binding Theory, Müller & Sternefeld 2001), semantics (e.g. strongest meaning, maximize presupposition), and
pragmatics (e.g. scalar implicature). In spite of a widely shared pretheoretical intuition that these diverse
phenomena are somehow related, no formal principle that ties them together has as yet been discovered.
Even within morphology, the existence of a unified blocking principle remains controversial.
Morphological theories that adopt blocking as a fundamental principle include Paradigm Function
Morphology (Stump 2001) and Minimalist Morphology (Wunderlich & Fabri 1994). To make blocking
formally tractable and to avoid empirically unwanted globality, they specify the space of competing alternatives (in technically very different ways) as a paradigmatic grid of productive functional categories,
where a category is productive if and only if it has a default exponent. Defaults and blocking then together
ensure that every feature bundle corresponds to one and only one form. Thus, worse blocks *badder and
*worser, and quicker blocks *quicklier and *quickerly. But glory does not block gloriosity, since nominalizations do not compete in a paradigm; still less is there blocking among unproductive categories, such as
English diminutives: birdlet „ birdie „ birdikin, princekin „ princelet „ princeling, essayette „ essaylet.
A controversial consequence of this approach is that in paradigms where periphrastic forms appear just
where corresponding synthetic forms are missing, morphology must block syntax (Poser-blocking). This is
sharply at odds with the approach taken in Distributed Morphology. DM has no general blocking principle
other than the Subset Principle, which resolves competition between morphemes (Vocabulary Items) at
single nodes, e.g. ox-en vs. box-es, bett-er vs. *good-er. It deals with complementarity between larger
expressions not by blocking but by merger and movement operations at various points in the derivation,
so that competing formations are just different spellouts of the same syntactic structure. For example,
pre-spellout Head Movement, Lowering, and Local dislocation derive synthetic forms from the same
syntactic structures that underlie the corresponding periphrastic forms. Fusion of distinct unlinearized
feature bundles generates portmanteaux, such as Swahili si-, which supersedes Negative ha- + 1.Sg. affix
ni- in the verb paradigm. Whole-word portmanteaux are treated by root suppletion plus zero allomorphs:
e.g. worse has a suppletive allomorph of bad and a zero allomorph of -er).
I provide two arguments that the derivational machinery of DM, despite this considerable richness,
cannot account for the full range of morphological complementarity phenomena, and necessarily loses
generalizations that are straightforwardly captured by blocking approaches.
The first argument involves competition among morphemes within a word that are not inserted at the
same node, and therfore cannot be dealt with by merger operations. Vedic Sanskrit has two agent noun
suffixes, (1) preaccenting 1 -tar-V , which forms nouns that, like verbs, assign structural case to their objects
and get adverb modifiers, and (2) accented -tár-N , which forms nouns that have genitive objects and adjective modifiers (Kiparsky 2016, likewise Avestan, Lowe 2015). The former is only attached directly to verb
roots, the latter is attached high in the structure to arbitrarily complex verbs. They form a privative semantic opposition: the low 1 -tar-V denotes habitual or professional agency in ongoing time, the high -tár-N
simply denotes agency in general (like English -er). The generalization is that the structurally high semantically nondescript -tár-N is used when and only when the structurally low 1 -tar-V suffix is unavailable,
namely: (1) to denote past or future agency, or occasional agency, and (2) when the verb is morphologically complex (causative, intensive, desiderative, denominative, or prefixed), to denote any kind of agency
whatever. The problem for DM is this. Suppose a high agent is introduced in a derivation. The derivation
must crash if and only of a low agent can be successfully introduced in a competing derivation. But DM
allows only rules to compete, and high and low agents can’t be introduced by the same rule, since they are
not inserted at the same node and do not realize the same syntactic features bundles.
A second set of arguments that supports blocking over DM-style movement comes from cases where a
morpheme is excluded in a phonological context and the gap is supplied by periphrasis. The severity of the
problem depends on the particular assumptions that are made about the phonology/morphology interface,
but no version of DM can do full justice to it. If merger and movement operations precede Vocabulary
Insertion, they have no access to the phonology. The phonological constraints on the synthetic comparative -er are then not expressible in the grammar. Bobaljik (2012) suggests suggests that they “reflect
statistical regularities in the input to the language learner”. This is perhaps defensible for English in view
of the overlap between the synthetic and periphrastic comparative in disyllabic adjectives, but it cannot
be seriously maintained is cases where the synthetic morpheme is subject to a categorical phonological
restriction. For example, Sanskrit verbs regularly form their perfect stems by reduplicating the root. Instead, a periphrastic perfect consisting of “be” or “do” plus a nominal form of the verb is required if the
root is (1) superheavy (V̄C or VCC), e.g. ı̄ks. ‘see’ Ñ ı̄ks.-ām
. ca-kr-e, or (2) morphologically complex, e.g.
cint-ay- ‘think’ Ñ cint-ay-ām ās-a. There is nothing statistical about these conditions.
Versions of DM which allow late operations such as Local Dislocation to access phonology (Embick
2010), could deal with restriction (1). However, another constraint on the Sanskrit root perfect is (3) that
it may not have a present meaning, hence bibhayām
. ca-kār-a ‘has feared’ (vs. bibhāya ‘fears’). So the
merger operation must be late (Local dislocation) because it must see the syllable weight of the root, but
it must must be early (Lowering) because it must see the semantics – a contradiction.
Worse, there are cases where the synthetic form must be derived by an early operation but is blocked
by derived phonological properties of the base. The Classical Greek perfect mediopassive is obligatorily
periphrastic when the stem+ending would yield a phonologically irreparable consonant cluster (Smyth
1920):
(1) Sg.
1.
2.
3.
Du. 2,3.
Pl. 1.
2.
3.
lélumai
lélusai
lélutai
lélusthon
lelũmetha
lélusthe
léluntai
‘loosen’ gégrammai ‘write’
gégrapsai
gégraptai
gégraph th on
gegrámmetha
gégraph th e
gegramménoi eisí (for unpronouncable *gegráph ntai)
Blocking the Lowering operation here would require access not only to the output of Vocabulary Insertion,
but to the phonological computation that it feeds. This distribution is readily accounted for in a lexicalist
model where morphology and phonology interact cyclically and synthetic forms block periphrastic forms,
but appears to be incompatible with the basic architectural commitments of DM.
References
Jonathan D. Bobaljik. 2012 Universals in Comparative Morphology: Suppletion, Superlatives, and the Structure of Words.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Embick, David. 2010. Localism and globalism in morphology and phonology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kiparsky, Paul. 2016. The agent suffixes as a window into Vedic grammar. In Dieter Gunkel, Brent Vine, Joshua Katz, and
Michael Weiss (edd.) Sahasram Ati Srajas: Indo-Iranian and Indo-European Studies in Honor of Stephanie W. Jamison.
Ann Arbor: Beech Stave Press.
Müller, Gereon & Wolfgang Sternefeld. 2001. The Rise of Competition in Syntax. In G. Müller & W. Sternefeld, Competition
in Syntax, Berlin: Mouton.
Stump, Gregory 2001. Inflectional morphology. Cambridge: CUP.
Wunderlich, Dieter & Ray Fabri. 1994. Minimalist Morphology: An approach to inflection. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft
20: 236-294.