Phi-features and the Modular Architecture of - UMR 7023 - CNRS

Lexicon
This simple model may be enriched in various ways. Modules may be stacked
hierarchically, inheriting information and mechanisms from other modules. Syntax
and morphology may supervene on a shared computational substrate, yet put it to
use and add to it differently (Ackema and Neeleman 2007). In a standard module,
its mechanisms only see information from the outside if translated or tagged for or
fed to them by an interface at a specific point in their operation. However, the interface
may be made continuous, bidirectional, and constituted of transformations
complex enough to be modules themselves (Jackendoff 2002, Ackema and
Neeleman 2003, 2007). A step up are 'super-modules' that take another module as
input, rather than shunt object to and from it, and directly affect its internal
mechanisms or information or intermediate representations (Barrett 2005; cf.
Reinhart 2006 for interpretation affecting syntactic locality).
Interfaces modulate the envelope of standard modules, rendering visible to its
mechanisms information from the outside. Remove the envelope, and the veil between
modules falls down, yet may emerge in other ways. In Distributed Morphology,
the same computation manipulates objects of both syntactic and morphophonological
types, with different results according to the type. The type of an
object is preserved by it, so that objects of one type are transformed into others of
the same type. This type preservation intrinsically partitions computations into
two non-interacting chains of operations, each chain manipulating objects of either
syntactic or morphophonological type only, not both. The chains are linked by a
translation operation, Vocabulary Insertion, that changes an object from syntactic
to morphophonological type (Embick and Noyer 2001, 2007). Type-sensitivity
and type-preservation make of each chain a domain-specific, encapsulated module,
and the translation is the interface between them. More generally, encapsulation
and domain-specificity may be construed as derivatory and nuanceable consequences
of interactions due to the information type(s) that an operation takes
from and returns to a 'blackboard' shared by them all (see the citations below (5);
Bird and Klein 2002, Tseng 2005 on syntax-morphophonology).
Thus what a module is and how it emerges varies within broadly modular architectures,
from Fodorian near-black-boxes to patterns of interaction in a common
pool of mechanisms and information types. The right theory is partly indicated
by the 'strength' of modularity on the criteria in (5). The subsystems of
Government and Binding syntax, X-bar, θ, Case, binding, bounding, control, and
government theories or 'modules', are isolable as distinct principles over coherent
aspects of syntactic objects, but free to interact and refer to the same information,
although aspects of modularity do sometimes emerge (Rezac 2010c). At the
coarser grain of the 'mental organs' of syntax, PF and LF, modularity is systematic
and pervasive, so a stronger theory of it is called for.
A strong modularity is above all evident and agreed on in the relationship of
syntax and realization, perhaps because realization is more easily inspected than
interpretation, perhaps because syntax is simply more of a module with respect to
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