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

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English participle allomorphy in (45) is outside syntax not only because it refers to
nonsyntactic information, but also because there are no syntactic devices that
could relate the allomorphs /əd/, /ən/, /t/, and umlaut. However, even when a phenomenon
resembles syntactic mechanisms, this may be a mirage. Emblematic are
position alternations sensitive to phonology. In (50) t oscillates between prefix and
suffix, recalling syntactic movement, but the position is conditioned by vowel
height, and so occurs outside syntax by the principle of phonology-free syntax. 14
(50) a. t-okm-è b. ab-t-é c. Rule: t- __[stem [-low V]], else -t
2-eat-PERF do-2-PERF
you ate you did
(Afar, Noyer 1992: 228f.)
Reference to segmental phonology is a clear giveaway of a nonsyntactic
mechanism, but it is not the only one. Aronoff (1994: 24f. ) presents an eloquent
exposition of the logic that puts certain manipulations of syntactic features into the
morphology rather than syntax. Below it is extended to phi-features. His example
is the English use of the participle in (45) in both the perfect and the passive: She
has heaved it up, left it, cloven it asunder and It was heaved up, left, cloven asunder,
from heave, leave, cleave. The use of the same form in the two periphrases,
their syncretism, cannot be accidental. In an accidental syncretism, two syntactic
structures simply happen to have the same realization, as English en for plural in
ox-en and for past participle in beat-en. This would require us to stipulate accidental
identity for perfect and passive verbs across all the distinct formations in (45):
V+ed for heave, V+ablaut+en for cleave, V+ablaut+t for leave. It is clear that
there is a single abstract entity shared by the perfect and the passive across these
various formations, the participle, in a metaparadigmatic syncretism. The question
is whether the participle represents a syntactic entity or not. If it does, the perfect
and the passive must share some common syntactic core that the participle realizes,
for instance V°+Asp°. If there is not one, it is necessary to posit a morphological
component that maps the syntactic features of V + perfect and V + passive
to the participle entity that exists only in morphology. Morphology then realizes
the participle in the different formations in (45).
14 Similar phenomena are rarer than (45) but robust, such as enclisis vs. circumclisis based on the
stress host prosody in Franco-Provençal (Morin 1979a: 304f. note 5), and the synthetic-analytic
alternations of the English comparative in section 2.3. Their reference to phonology matches
their flagrant violation of syntactic atoms in (50), and syntactic islands in Latin (49)b where the
enclitic que 'and' inserts after the P of the second conjunct if monosyllabic (Anderson 1992:
201f., Embick and Noyer 2001: 575f.). For some intra-morpheme/constituent placement may be
invoked prosodic phonology, as in root-and-pattern morphology (cf. Ussishkin 2007); see Luis
and Spencer (2004) vs. Harris (2000) on the tradeoffs for Udi root-internal clitic placement. In
either case, some extra-syntactic system superficially appears to duplicate movement; cf. also
Frampton (2004) on analogy between movement and metathesis. Clearly morphological is also
Noyer's (1992), Halle's (1997) feeding/bleeding between discontinuous exponents according to
their arbitrary feature content; syntactic exploration through separate heads has restricted itself to
the far simpler case of circumfixes with fixed content across exponents (Julien 2002: 6.2).