Economy Constraints on Phrasal Causatives
Arka Banerjee, Pritha Chandra
August 2024 

Economy considerations lie at the core of linguistic theorising, with the system favouring expressions with a Least Effort flavour (less computational/ representational costs); see Chomsky (1995) et seq. The Strong Minimalist Thesis mandates the mapping of syntactic outputs to unique LF/PF strings, ruling out true optionality where two or more PF forms coexist with the same LF representation (though, see Biberauer and Richards (2006) for exceptions). In this paper, we show that minimally different PF forms can co-exist with a single meaning, but they are ranked from good to marginal on the basis of costs incurred from semantic computations and equivalence at LF (following Reinhart (1998)). Our query is directed at Bangla (a.k.a. Bengali; an Eastern Indo-Aryan language) morphological and phrasal causatives, with the former scoring a higher rank than the latter.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008384 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	In the Proceedings of GLOW in Asia XIV 2024
keywords:	morphological causative, phrasal causative, economy, lf, bangla, semantics, morphology, syntax
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