Events
PSU M circle: Yvonne Van Baal, Terje Lohndal, David Natvig & Mike Putnam
The final research talk of the Spring 2024 semester, on Monday 15 April, will be given by Yvonne van Baal, Terje Lohndal, David Natvig, and Mike Putnam. The title of their talk is Comparing models of the syntax-morphology interface with heritage language data.
Abstract
The conceptualization of features remains a central theme in generative approaches to the syntax-morphology interface since the early 1990s. These have played an enhanced role in late-insertion approaches to morphosyntax, in which the establishment of feature-exponency relations is of fundamental importance. Multiple frameworks have been developed to model the syntax-morphology interface, opening the door to framework comparisons. In this paper we review the advantages and disadvantages of what we label a direct and an indirect approach to this interface, namely Nanosyntax and Distributed Morphology, respectively. To illustrate the similarities and differences between these frameworks, we demonstrate how nominal suffixes are realized in varieties of Norwegian, with a focus on specific patterns in the heritage variety of North American Norwegian. We show that both direct and indirect approaches to the syntax-morphology interface are capable of modeling the alternations observed in the data. That is, they both achieve descriptive adequacy. However, they do so by virtue of rather different architectural assumptions, raising the question of how to compare and adjudicate their relative strengths and weaknesses.
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