| Description |
According to the Crossmodular Parallelism thesis, principles and rules
are shared across modules, and differences among the latter are mostly
due to the fact that each is based on a different alphabet of primitives. This
talk argues for this thesis in a particular area of grammar:
operations on abstract morphological structures are the same as ones
that operate on phonological representations. Under this view,
phonology and (part of) morphology share the same abstract grammar,
but operate on different alphabets: phonological features and segments
vs. abstract morphological features and morphemes. I illustrate the
need for this view of morphology (and phonology) with plural
inflection in Basque finite verbs.
In joint work with Karlos Arregi (Morphotactics, a book to appear in early 2012),
we propose a modular analysis of a particular plural morpheme (-e/-te) with two basic components: (i)
its generation and featural composition, and (ii) its placement within the word.
With respect to (i), this morpheme is the result of Fission:
pronominal clitics in finite verbs undergo a splitting operation that
separates certain person and number features. Fission has non-trivial
similarities with certain diphthongization phenomena, which provides
evidence for an implementation of Fission based on Crossmodular
Parallelism. Adopting ideas about diphthongization from Calabrese
(2005), we argue that Fission is a repair operation triggered by a
constraint that prevents the expression of certain person and number
features in the same morpheme.
With respect to (ii), we argue that placement of the plural clitic
-e/-te must be dealt with in a separate Linearization component.
Specifically, a study of variation in the Bizkaian Basque dialectal
area reveals that a correct account of the placement of this morpheme
must take into account abstract displacement and copying operations
that have important parallels with phonological metathesis and
reduplication, once again providing evidence for the Crossmodular
Parallelism thesis. The analysis is based on an extension of the
formalism proposed in Halle & Harris 2005 for this type of operation.
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