The Syntax-Semantics Group will hold its next meeting on Monday, September21st, at 1-2pm in Room 002 of the McGill linguistics department, 1085 Dr. Penfield. Online participants can join with this zoom link.
Emma Custer (McGill) will be presenting “Long-distance allomorphy in Pulaar is locally conditioned.” Here is the abstract:
A question actively debated within the Distributed Morphology framework (Halle & Marantz 1993) concerns the morphosyntactic environment which may condition a morpheme’s phonological form. Although many agree that determination of form is subject to locality constraints, there is disagreement about the nature of these constraints. Under the Node Adjacency Hypothesis (NAH), only a node that is linearly adjacent to a given morpheme may condition that morpheme’s form (Embick 2010; Arregi & Nevins 2012). Under the Span Adjacency Hypothesis (SAH), a structurally adjacent span, or sequence of heads in the same extended projection, may do so (Merchant 2015). In this talk, I discuss data from Pulaar which are problematic for the NAH. In Pulaar, verbal suffixes display allomorphy despite not being surface-adjacent to the node(s) conditioning the allomorphy. I argue that this “long-distance” allomorphy is illusory; at Vocabulary Insertion, allomorph choice is determined locally, conditioned by features of nodes in a structurally adjacent span. Suffixes are then linearized in a Mirror Principle-violating order, producing the effect that structurally adjacent nodes are not necessarily linearly adjacent. The analysis reaffirms locality as a constraint on the environment that may condition allomorphy and provides support for the SAH over the NAH.