Andrew Murphy

Certain patterns of directional syncretism, in particular bidirectional syncretism, have been argued to necessitate the power of directional rules that create a form dependency between two cells in a paradigm. The existence of such patterns, divergent bidirectional syncretism in particular, has been claimed to be fatal for the approach to syncretism adopted in Distributed Morphology that holds that (directional) syncretism always involves a retreat to less specific and therefore less marked exponents. In this paper, we will demonstrate that this is not the case. Apparently challenging cases of directional syncretism can be adequately handled on the view that impoverishment may have two outcomes: deletion of features or insertion of contextually unmarked values. Once this view is adopted, bidirectionality is no longer a problem. Furthermore, we argue that this view allows us to still maintain the claim that syncretism is universally markedness decreasing if markedness is defined over insertion contexts rather than exponents.

In this paper, we provide an account of the syntactic restrictions on noun phrase discontinuity in Iquito. In Iquito, noun phrases containing determiners that have undergone movement must have a discontinuous realization where the determiner strands the noun. With moved possessive noun phrases, we find apparent pied-piping of the possessum in addition to the determiner only in case the determiner is semantically associated with the possessor. We argue that this “possessum pied-piping” is determined by the syntactic attachment height of the determiner within the noun phrase. In doing so, we provide a novel way of restricting the mechanism of distributed deletion based on configurational properties of the noun phrase, rather than some information structural or phonological property. Furthermore, we show how extending this analysis to phrase-internal syntax also allows us to derive the apparently idiosyncratic word orders we find inside NPs and PPs, thereby providing a unified account of both phrase-level and clause-level word order in Iquito.

The precise nature of Ā-dependencies that terminate in a pronoun has been a long-standing subject of cross-linguistic research. Traditionally, it has been assumed that there are two derivational strategies to form resumptive Ā-dependencies: movement and base generation. Island configurations have played a crucial role in determining which derivational strategy is employed in a given language, as islands effects are expected to arise from dependencies created by movement but not by base generation. The body of cross-linguistic research on resumption has shown that the situation is more complicated once other diagnostics are taken into account, as languages can have mixed resumption profiles. In this paper, we discuss resumption in Ā-dependencies in Akan, a Kwa language spoken in Ghana, and illustrate that, despite their general insensitivity to islands, resumptive dependencies also show many classic hallmarks of movement. We situate these findings in the broader context of a general understanding of resumption cross-linguistically and discuss how the conflicting diagnostics might be reconciled with a movement-based analysis.

Tenyidie shows a typologically unusual pattern of φ-covarying agreement with anaphors, but not other arguments. We argue that this apparent agreement actually reveals the nature of anaphoric binding in the language, which involves an Agree relation between the anaphor and its antecedent mediated by a licensing head. The features on this mediating head are realized overtly in Tenyidie. This is not genuine φ-agreement, but rather a morphological reflex of the binding relation itself. We provide supporting evidence from a range of constructions and also show how this analysis accounts for restrictions on anaphora in double object constructions. Tenyidie therefore suggests that there is a close link between binding and Agree.

When grammatical constraints impose conflicting requirements on a linguistic expression, this conflict is often resolved by employing a repair operation. This repair can take various forms, for example insertion, deletion or modification of linguistic material. In this paper, I provide a number of case studies in morpho-syntax, showing how there are striking parallels between the repairs employed in phonology and morpho-syntax with regard to the context, type and shape of the repair. Ultimately, it is argued that, given clear similarities between these distinct domains of grammar, repairs should be governed by the same basic principles, namely a system of violable constraints. This view supports the hypothesis of Cross-modular Structural Parallelism (Nevins 2008; Arregi & Nevins 2012).