Paula Fenger (UConn/Leipzig)
Coming to the party late: On the timing and limitations of word building
In this talk I explore how functional syntactic material is mapped into different PF units, specifically words. I focus on verb and auxiliary patterns, as this particular domain has rich variation in whether tense, mood, aspect and valency changing morphology is expressed in single or multi-word constructions. On the surface the choice for an inflectional category being expressed as auxiliary or affix seems arbitrary. In this talk, however, I argue that it is not as arbitrary as it may appear, and propose that systematic differences can be explained when syntactic word-formation is sensitive to syntactic domains (phases).I look at two in-depth case-studies of two head-final languages, Japanese and Turkish. I show that mismatches between syntactic and phonological word-hood tests reveals more systematicity than previously thought. I show that these mismatches follow from particular word building processes and their interaction with syntactic domains. Hence these mismatches are not arbitrary. I propose that timing differences in the word building operations derivation lead to variation in auxiliary patterns, which makes various predictions. For example, I provide evidence that auxiliary patterns in a language pattern with other phenomena that align with the timing of word building, such as matching constraints in ellipsis.
I show that there is more uniformity than initial appearances suggest in the expression of features as single words or periphrastic constructions, and that there may be universal aspects to the analysis. Furthermore, the apparent mismatches between phonological and syntactic tests for word-hood are in fact regular consequences of the relevant processes and their timing pointing to the need for a more integrated approach to cross-modular research.