Narrow syntactic movement after Spell-out, Ojibwe, Acholi, Malayalam, Malagasy
Eva Dobler, Heather Newell, Maire Noonan, Glyne Piggott, Mina Sugimura, Lisa Travis, Tobin Skinner
September 2011 

This paper discusses the properties and implications of head movement across a phase boundary. We provide evidence which shows that syntactic phase boundaries correspond to phonological boundaries at the word level. Analyses of the syntactic and phonological properties of phonologically sub-minimal affixes in Ojibwe, direct and indirect causatives in Malayalam and Malagasy, and alienable versus inalienable possession in Acholi lead us to make the following important claims regarding phases, among others: 1) phase boundaries correspond to event boundaries (or the final boundary at the end of the derivation), similar to Chomsky’s (2001) equation of phases to propositions; we additionally assume a parallel system in the nominal domain and that such phasal demarcations are presumably true of all languages; 2) the phasal distribution of syntactic heads has a direct effect on their phonological behavior; 3) the phase head is included in the Spell-out domain (see Michaels 2009); and 4) head movement out of a phase is possible both before and after Spell-out of that phase, depending on certain structural and featural syntactic characteristics (i.e. only heads that are phase-adjacent may extract from the phase before Spell-out, and only if they possess the relevant movement-inducing uninterpretable features). We further argue that derivational operations may manipulate constituents that have already undergone Spell-out, but that the phonological effects of such operations are highly constrained.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/005852 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	McGill University
keywords:	head movement, phases, inalienable possession, causatives, spell-out, morphology, syntax, phonology
Downloaded:	362 times

 

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