Mariia Privizentseva (Leipzig)
Eligibility at PF: nominal ellipsis and concord in Moksha Mordvin
In some languages modifiers generally do not show concord with the noun but are inflected if the noun is elided. This phenomenon is schematically presented in (1):
(1) a. [adjective noun-infl ] / *[adjective-infl noun-infl ]
b. [adjective-infl ___N ] / *[adjective ___N ]
In this talk, I will present new data on this type of nominal ellipsis in Moksha Mordvin and show that they cannot be derived by existing approaches to emergence of inflection under ellipsis (see Kester 1996; Bošković & Şener 2014; Ruda 2016; Saab & Lipták 2016, Murphy 2018, and Saab 2019). On the basis of the distribution of inflectional exponents, I will argue that inflection in elliptical contexts is an instance of nominal concord and suggest that concord is a regular property of Moksha nominal syntax, i.e., valued concord probes are present on nominal modifiers in non-elliptical contexts as well, but they remain without phonological realization.
In order to derive absence of inflection in non-elliptical contexts, I propose that (i) Spell-Out applies locally and (ii) probe features are by default ineligible at PF and need to undergo Probe Conversion in order to get accessible to PF processes. Concord exponents are not realized in non-elliptical contexts because Probe Conversion counter-feeds Spell-Out, and they receive realization under ellipsis because Spell-Out of a nominal modifier is postponed then.