Abstract
It has been proposed that allomorphy and suppletion is restricted not only by (various conceptions of) cyclic locality, but also by adjacency of elements. Embick (2010) proposes that two elements can only enter into an relationship of allomorphy if they are linearly adjacent to each other, whereas Adger et al. (2003) and Bobaljik (2012) argue that elements must be structurally adjacent.
In this paper, we show that there are both empirical and conceptual problems for adjacency based theories and we argue instead in favour of a cyclic locality only view; whereby allomorphic relations are not universally sensitive to adjacency restrictions. Apparent arguments in favour of adjacency are shown to be the result accessibility or of ‘hyper-contextual’ rules of vocabulary insertion, which make reference to multiple nodes, which combine together to serve as the context for suppletion.
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Notes
For reasons of space we do not fully explicate how the ‘one node up’ effect can be theoretically derived, but see Moskal (2015, to appear) for extensive discussion. The idea in brief is not that every category defining node is cyclic, but potentially cyclic, with cyclic status afforded to the highest cyclic node in the domain. This idea is similar in spirit to recent syntactic proposals that phasehood is not an inherent property of certain projections, but rather the highest projection of a certain domain, see Bobaljik and Wurmbrand (2005), den Dikken (2007), Bošković (2014), Wurmbrand (2014) and references contained therein. Furthermore, see Newell (2008) on the relation between word-internal locality domains and phases.
Note that ‘D’ is only used as a label for a pronominal base here.
It should be noted that Embick uses a different conception of cyclic locality as to that formulated above.
Note that pruning is not obligatory for all nodes with null exponents; rather, Embick “posit[s] pruning rules where required” (Embick 2010, 59).
Unless the comparative mediates in forming a suppletive form, such as in ABC cases like Latin bonus-melior-optimus; see Bobaljik (2012) for discussion.
Note that agreement features are located on v.
Another linearity violation of lexical material is observed in Lak (Radkevich 2014), where the root for ‘moon/month’ suppletes in the context of (ergative) case, across a plural morpheme -dald:
-
(i)
sg
pl
abs
barz
barz-ru
‘moon/month’
‘moon/month-pl’
erg
zur-ul
zur-dald-il
‘moon/month-erg’
‘moon/month-pl-erg’
-
(i)
An anonymous reviewer points out that adjacency is motivated by cases outside of suppletion as well, for example zero-causatives (i) and exocentric compounds (ii):
-
(i)
The shoe-shine boy shined/*shone the shoes.
-
(ii)
Toronto Maple Leafs/*Toronto Maple Leaves
The blocking of irregular forms in zero-causatives follows from our account on the assumption that the caus morpheme is a head that lies between the category defining v and T (Harley 2008). Thus, caus is one node above the category defining node, and prevents T from being in the AD; hence shone is disallowed in (i):
-
(iii)
[ [ [ \(\sqrt{\mbox{SHINE}}\) v ] caus ] T ]
As to exocentric compounds, we wish to remain agnostic—largely for reasons of space—as to whether the current approach offers anything to explain why irregular forms should be ‘blocked’ there. This is an issue that is certainly worthy of fuller attention, and we leave it to future research.
-
(i)
Data from the Surrey Morphology Group database (http://www.smg.surrey.ac.uk/suppletion/).
This blocking effect can be derived under structural adjacency only if we assume that singular is the absence of number.
With a /yV/ sequence resulting in a front vowel in pronouns.
Hyper-contextual VI-rules are reminiscent of span-conditioned allomorphy, which has been appealed to in various recent work, particularly in the nanosyntax framework (Svenonius 2012; Bye and Svenonius 2012; Merchant 2015). However, it should be noted that we are still maintaining that these rules are constrained by accessibility restrictions, i.e. the Accessibility Domain, and we do not see a natural restrictor in the cited spanning works. Note that Tamil also provides evidence against the Spanning Insertion Hypothesis of Merchant (2015), which claims that only contiguous spans of nodes can factor into VI. In Tamil, the number node is ignored in the computation of the base, since the base inflects for case, irrespective of whether the form is singular or plural.
Note that throughout this paper we have taken the strong position that adjacency (linear or structural) plays no role in allomorphy and shown that in many cases, purported adjacency effects stem from elsewhere. We are not however denying that linear relations can play a role in allomorphy—see Arregi and Nevins (2012) and references therein for evidence from Basque and Romance clitic systems that the position of a clitic relative to T has an effect on its surface form—rather we are saying that adjacency is not a universal restrictor on allomorphy, contra previous work.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the editors for giving us the opportunity to submit to this volume, two anonymous reviewers from Morphology for their insightful and helpful comments, as well as audiences at Allomorphy: Its Logic and Limitations held at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. We would also like to thank Jonathan Bobaljik for discussion on the ideas here.
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Moskal, B., Smith, P.W. Towards a theory without adjacency: hyper-contextual VI-rules. Morphology 26, 295–312 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-015-9275-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-015-9275-y