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

singular or 1 st /2 nd person plural. The means to do so are introduced by the pioneering
work of Laka (1993) and others on the separate placement of person and number
agreement morphemes through X 0 movement in the syntax. Subsets of phifeatures
such as [number] are conceptualized as independent syntactic terminals.
In this manner Bonet's (1991) featural decomposition of Romance clitics may be
recast in syntax. Her [3 rd person], [plural], or [locative] features become corresponding
syntactic terminals, much as C° has become Fin°, Force°, Top°, Int° in
the cartography of the left periphery of Rizzi (1997). Among the rich studies in
this vein are Ritter (1995), Polletto (2000), De Crousaz and Shlonsky (2003),
Kayne (2000, 2007, 2008), Cardinaletti (2008), Taraldsen (2010), and with different
assumptions, Manzini and Savoia (2002, 2005, 2008, 2010); Laenzlinger
(1993) pioneers syntactic constraints on clitic features. The term nanosyntax of
Taraldsen (2010) reflects the spirit of the analyses. It may be pursued independently
of any considerations of the scope of the morphological component. However,
it may also be given deeper foundations in modularity, in order to exclude a
morphological component that would manipulate the same features as syntax or
effectuate operations that resemble those of it, as discussed in section 2.1.
Nanosyntax remains to be applied to opaque agreement and cliticization of
any complexity. Their morphological signature indicates the contrasts with other
syntactic phenomena that need to be addressed (Rezac 2010c):
– Inertness: The opaque phenomena above neither lose nor gain syntacticosemantic
properties. Syntactic movement can often reconstruct, but it does
affect properties such as binding. Empirically notable is the difference between
all opaque cliticization and the PCC repair (cf. (58)), differing on
inertness although superficially identical.
– Information: Opaque phenomena refer to the subset of syntactic information
also used by exponence. Again, the PCC repair provides a minimal
contrast (cf. (63)).
– Mechanisms: The locality of opaque phenomena contrasts with canonical
syntactic movement across phrase-structurally large or unbounded distances.
The PCC repair spans them, (64). The parametrization of opaque
cliticization may also be technically difficult to achieve. More strikingly,
there remain to be found analogues in canonical syntactic movement.
Thus the nanosyntactic approach finds a way for syntax to model opaque
agreement and cliticization, but it does not yet bridge the divide between them and
established syntactic dependencies. These considerations do not exclude a partly
syntactic approach to the former, but indicate the need to derive their distinctive
properties and their coherence in their modular signature. Distributed Morphology
is a step along this road, positing a single computational system for syntax and its
realization, but modularizing its operations through the information types (section
2.1); see Harris (1996), Arregi and Nevins (2006ab, 2008) for opaque cliticization,
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