Crosslinguistic variation in morphosyntax

Heidi Harley, University of Arizona

DGfS/GLOW Summer School, Stuttgart

Aug. 14-Sept. 2, 2006

When: Tues/Thurs, 8.30-10.30

Contact: hharley@email.arizona.edu

Note: The order of events has changed -- now it will be verbal phenomena first, nominal (phi-feature) phenomena second -- and four readings below are new (in Lecture 5: Nevins on dual, Frampton on Impoverishment, and in Lectures 1 and 2: Harley on causatives and Travis on event structure) since the readings page was first put up. The Travis reading is still not downloadable, though the others are; I'll get the Travis one up there if I can!

Languages & language families we'll consider data from in this course:

Assorted (Harley & Ritter, Harley 2006), Zuni (Cowper), Ojibwe (McGinnis), Latin (Williams), Russian (Bobaljik), Germanic (Frampton), Geogian (Bejar), Japanese (Harley 2005), Malagasy (Travis), St'at'imcets (Davis & Demirdache), Persian (Folli, Harley, Karimi), Inuktitut (Johns), Cupeno (Barragan), Navajo (Hale), Athapaskan (Rice)

Course Requirement for Credit: One short paper (5 pages), either addressing an issue in morphosyntax raised by this course with data not considered here, or a summary and evaluation of a paper on morphosyntax not included in the reading list here.

Due date: Submission to me by email by midnight, Sept. 7th.

Schedule of Topics:

Part 1: The bipartite structure of verbs

Lecture 1: Tuesday, Aug. 15

Syntacticocentric morphology: DM overview

Bipartite verb structure: Little v cross-linguistically

Harley, H. On the causative construction. To appear in S. Miyagawa and M. Saito, eds, Handbook of Japanese Linguistics, OUP.

Lecture 2:Thursday, Aug. 17

Travis, Lisa. 2000. Event structure in syntax. In Events as Grammatical Objects: The Converging Perspectives of Lexical Semantics and Syntax, edited by Carol Tenny and James Pustejovsky, pp. 145-185. CSLI, Stanford

Davis, H. and H. Demirdache 2000. On Lexical Verb Meanings: Evidence from Salish. In J. Pustejovsky and C. Tenny (eds.), Events as Grammatical Objects: the Converging Perspectives of Lexical Semantics and Syntax. CSLI: Stanford University Press, 97-142.

More bipartite verb structure cross-linguistically

Folli, Raffaella, Heidi Harley and Simin Karimi. 2005. Determinants of event type in Persian Complex Predicates. Lingua 115:1365-1401.

Johns, Alana. 2005. Restricting Noun Incorporation: Root movement. Ms., University of Toronto. http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~ajohns/JohnsNI05.pdf

Lecture 3:Tuesday, Aug. 22

Bipartite verb structure with strange orderings

Luis M. Barragan. 2003 Movement and Allomorphy in the Cupeno Verb Construction. MITELF 5.

Hale, Ken. 2004. On the significance of Eloise Jelinek’s Pronominal Argument Hypothesis. In Formal approaches to function in grammar, ed. by A. Carnie, H. Harley and M. Willie. John Benjamins. 11-43.

Rice, Keren. 2000. Morpheme Order and Semantic Scope: Word Formation in the Athapaskan Verb. Cambridge University Press.

Part II: Numeration Variation: Phi-features

Lecture 4:Thursday, Aug. 24

Feature geometries: Organization of phi-features in pronominal bundles

Harley & Ritter (2002) Person and number in pronouns: a feature-geometric analysis. Language 78:482-526

What's more marked than what?

McGinnis, M. 2006. On markedness asymmetries in person and number. Language 81.3, 699-718

Cowper, E. 2006. A Note on Number. Linguistic Inquiry. vol. 36: 441-455

Lecture 5:Tuesday, Aug. 29

The significance of syncretism and the importance of impoverishment

Williams, Edwin. 1994. 'Remarks on lexical knowledge', Lingua 92, pp. 7-34.

Bobaljik, Jonathan David 2001. Syncretism without paradigms: Remarks on Williams 1981, 1994. Yearbook of Morphology 2001: 53-85

Frampton, J. 2002. Syncretism, impoverishment and the structure of person features. In Papers from the CLS Annual Meeting, 2002.

Nevins, A. 2006. "Dual is still more marked than plural."

Lecture 6:Thursday, Aug. 31

More on the significance of syncretism…

Harley, H. 2005. Underspecification, Impoverishment and Meta-paradigms: Accounting for syncretism. To appear in Adger, Harbour and Bejar, eds,…, OUP.

.…and the syntax of markedness

Bejar, Susana. 2000. "Locality, Cyclicity and Markedness of Georgian Verbal Morphology.