here - Linguistic Society of America

Friday, 4 JanuaryForumAbstracts:Eulàlia Bonet (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)The site of vocabulary insertionDistributed Morphology (DM), as originally conceived in Halle and Marantz (1993), is a morpheme-based model that assumeslate insertion. For the standard DM view competition among Vocabulary items is found only at the point of Vocabulary insertion,before all phonological operations. This view has been challenged, especially by researchers working within Optimality Theory(OT). Parallel versions of OT have proposed that for certain cases all allomorphs are inserted at the same time. with thephonology determining which allomorph is to be preferred in each context. In serial versions of OT it has further been proposedthat all Vocabulary insertion is performed by GEN and counts as an operation, like epenthesis, deletion or assimilation. This talkwill provide a critical review of the arguments and other evidence that have been put forward relating the selection of(allo)morphs to conclude that not all of them are inserted in the same fashion.Bert Vaux (Cambridge University)Neil Myler (New York University)Karlos Arregi (University of Chicago)Number marking in Western Armenian: a non-argument for outwardly-sensitive phonologically conditioned allomorphyA set of Western Armenian data originally reported in Vaux (1998, 2003) has recently been claimed to constitute an example ofoutwardly-sensitive phonologically conditioned allomorphy (Wolf 2011), a phenomenon widely argued to be unattested(Carstairs-McCarthy 1987; Paster 2006) and predicted to be impossible by the tenets of Distributed Morphology (Halle andMarantz 1993; Bobaljik 2000). We show that the full complexity of the Western Armenian data is better captured in an accountthat makes no reference to outwardly-sensitive phonological conditioning of this sort, but instead relies on standard DMmechanisms of inwardly-sensitive phonological conditioning, outwardly-sensitive morphosyntactic conditioning, andFission/feature copying (Halle 1997).Martha McGinnis Archibald (University of Victoria)The singular nature of Georgian plural agreementI argue that interactions among number-marking affixes on Georgian verbs arise primarily from syntactic competition foragreement with a number feature on T, as proposed by Béjar (2003). The subject triggers agreement ifitisplural; otherwise, a(first- or second-person) clitic object can do so. If only one argument triggers plural agreement in Georgian, then double pluralmarking cannot in fact be occurring in forms such as gv-nax-e-t ‘you (pl) saw us’, which include gv- ‘us’ as well as plural -t.Instead, I argue that these forms arise from morphologically encoding ‘us’ as a collective singular first person. Lomashvili andHarley (2011) argue that double plurals are banned only for 3.NOM.pl>2.DAT.pl, and instead postulate Impoverishment of the2.DAT argument's plural feature. The analysis proposed here correctly predicts the insertion of other items reflecting a plural orcollective object, such as aspectual prefixes (Aronson 1990:407 and L. Nash, p.c.).Jonathan Bobaljik (University of Connecticut)Susi Wurmbrand (University of Connecticut)Syntax all the way down: comparative evidenceA central tenet of Distributed Morphology (DM, Halle and Marantz 1993) is that the internal structure of complex words is anabstract, syntactic arrangement of the morphemes. In this, DM stands in opposition to frameworks such as the Word-and-Paradigm (WP) models of Anderson (1992) and Stump (2001) which recognize an abstract Morphosyntactic Representation(MSR) as the input to exponence, but which contend that the features making up this MSR are not hierarchically ordered. In thistalk, we present a continued argument for the DM view, arguing that word-internal locality conditions on suppletion (contextualallomorphy) are syntactic in both the broad sense (defined over an abstract, hierarchical configuration) and the narrow sense(showing subtle properties regarding the definition, and suspension of locality domains, which parallel those in the syntax,specifically, the syntax of quantifier scope in English complement clauses).98