Lexical categories, (re)categorization, and locality in morphosyntax
Maša Bešlin
February 2025 

This dissertation is about the nature of syntactic primitives and principles, their status in the grammar, and their interaction with extra-linguistic cognition. The dissertation has two parts unified by the common goal of streamlining the syntax by asking whether some of its proposed constructs are dispensable, whether the motivation for their existence can be found syntax-externally, and whether they must be assumed to be part of the initial state of the learner. While I discuss a range of phenomena in a number of languages, core empirical evidence throughout comes from adjectival derivation in Bosnian/Croatian/ Serbian (BCS). In the first part of the dissertation, I consider the status of lexical categories (LCs) in grammar. I argue that LCs noun, verb, and adjective are purely formal, abstract categories which have a distributional role in the syntaxes of individual languages, but which do not have a one-to-one mapping to any interpretive property. I argue against proposals that attribute universal syntactic or semantic properties to the specific LCs. In addition to discussing relevant data from a variety of languages, I provide two detailed case studies on mixed categories: passive and active participles. I show that all participles in the languages under discussion are in fact deverbal adjectives, in every syntactic position they appear in and regardless of their interpretation. While participles may denote (predicates of) properties or eventualities, I argue that these different interpretations are not cross-linguistically associated with more or less verbal or adjectival structure. This reinforces the conclusion that a direct one-to-one correspondence between an item’s LC and its interpretation does not exist. If correct, this proposal has significant consequences for our understanding of Universal Grammar. If there are no universal syntactic or semantic properties we can attribute to the LCs, then it becomes superfluous to assume that the individual LCs are part of the initial state of the learner. I propose that the cross-linguistic tendencies we observe around LCs may stem from the way non-linguistic knowledge is organized in the mind/brain. In the second part of the dissertation, I turn my attention to the formal principles that operate on grammatical primitives, asking specifically what kinds of locality constraints are employed by the grammar. While locality has been extensively studied in generative linguistics, the current offering of locality theories is arbitrary, redundant, baroque, and/or empirically inadequate. There are in essence three competing locality theories currently in circulation within the field: Featural Relativized Minimality (FRM), Phase theory as currently understood in the syntax literature (where it is a successor of Subjacency), and Phase theory as understood in the context of Distributed Morphology (DM). Despite recent attempts to devise a single, unified Phase theory which is responsible for both syntax-internal locality and interface locality, I argue on both conceptual and empirical grounds that the unification is unfeasible. In a detailed empirical study of deadjectival derivation in BCS, I show that adjectivization imposes a DM-locality boundary (for allomorphy and morphological tone assignment), but not a ‘big syntax’-locality boundary (for punctuated movement paths). Nonetheless, I show that the original inventory of locality principles can be reduced if we assume that (i) syntax-internal locality is regulated by FRM, and (ii) interface locality is regulated by Transfer, a modified version of Phase theory which has no syntax-internal effects. I reinterpret the evidence supporting Phase theory through the lens of FRM and demonstrate that the division of labor in (i)-(ii) not only achieves the right empirical cut, but also offers insight into why the grammar may require two distinct locality principles.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008838 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	University of Maryland doctoral dissertation
keywords:	lexical categories, locality, minimality, phase theory, spellout, allomorphy, morphological tone, bosnian/croatian/serbian, morphology, syntax
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