Workshop Announcement: Syntactic Approaches to Morphology

SCHEDULE

Venue: online (synchronous talks via Zoom)

Registration: There is no registration fee, but attendees need to register. 

For schedule and registration, click here.

Date: December 4-5, 2020

Organizers: Chris Collins (NYU) and Richard Kayne (NYU)

The purpose of this conference is to investigate the relationship between morphology and syntax, and in particular to investigate the extent to which morphological generalizations can be accounted for in terms of purely syntactic operations and conditions. Specific questions that could be addressed include the following:

Is there a need for a morphological component?

Is there a need for post-syntactic morphological operations?

How are morphemes combined with stems? By head movement, phrasal movement, affix hopping, morphological merger?

What is the status of competition and blocking?

How can suppletion and allomorphy be accounted for in syntactic terms?

How can syncretism be accounted for in syntactic terms?

To what extent can derived nominals be accounted for in syntactic terms?

What is the status of traditional terms such as affix, infix, word, bound, compound in syntactic approaches to morphology?

How are features like gender, noun class and declension class represented syntactically?

Speakers:

Judy Bernstein (Willian Paterson University)

Chris Collins (New York University)

Eva Dekany (Hungarian Academy of Sciences)

Richard Kayne (New York University)

Hilda Koopman (University of California, Los Angeles)

Thomas Leu (Université du Québec à Montréal)

Erik Zyman (University of Chicago).

Panel:

Adriana Belletti (University of Siena)

Gary Thoms (New York University)

Neil Myler (Boston University)

The conference will last two days (Friday December 4 and Saturday December 5). It will run from 12:00 noon EST to 3:30pm EST each day. Each talk will last 30 minutes, with 15 minutes for discussion. There will also be a panel of commentators at the end of the second day discussing the issues that come up in the talks.

Representative Publications:

Baker, M. (1985) “The Mirror Principle and Morphosyntactic Explanation,” Linguistic Inquiry, 16, 373-415.

Bernstein, J. (1993) “The Syntactic Role of Word Markers in Null Nominal Constructions,” Probus 5, 5-38.

Julien, M. (2002) Syntactic Heads and Word Formation, Oxford University Press, New York.

Kayne, R.S. (2008) “Expletives, Datives, and the Tension between Morphology and Syntax” in T. Biberauer (ed.) The Limits of Syntactic Variation, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 175-217.  (lingbuzz/000286, May 2006)

Kayne, R.S. (2010) “Toward a Syntactic Reinterpretation of Harris and Halle (2005)” in R. Bok-Bennema, B. Kampers-Manhe & B. Hollebrandse (eds.) Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2008, Selected papers from 'Going Romance' Groningen 2008, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 145-170.  (lingbuzz/001101, Dec. 2009)

Kayne, R.S. (2017) “Antisymmetry and Morphology. Prefixes vs. Suffixes” in C. Mayr and E. Williams (eds.) Festschrift für Martin Prinzhorn, Wiener Linguistische Gazette, 82, 145-161.

(lingbuzz/003445, May 2017)

Kayne, R.S. (2018) “Toward an Understanding of Apparent Suppletion in Romance Pronominal Possessives”, Probus, 30, 251-276. (lingbuzz/004042, May 2018)

Kayne, R.S. (2019) “What is Suppletion? On *goed and on went in Modern English”, Transactions of the Philological Society, 117, 434-454.  

(earlier version: lingbuzz/003241, Dec. 2016)

Koopman, H. (2005) “Korean (and Japanese) Morphology from a Syntactic Perspective,” Linguistic Inquiry, 36, 601-633.

Leu, T. (2015) The Architecture of Determiners, Oxford University Press, New York.

Ordóñez, F. (2002) “Some Clitic Combinations in the Syntax of Romance,” Catalan Journal of Linguistics, 1, 201-224.

Pollock, J.-Y. (1989) “Movement, Universal Grammar and the Structure of IP,” Linguistic Inquiry 20, 365-424.

Postma, G. (1993) “The Syntax of the Morphological Defectivity of BE,” HIL Manuscripts, 3, 31-67.

Săvescu-Ciucivara, O. (2009) A Syntactic Analysis of Pronominal Clitic Clusters in Romance. The View from Romanian, Doctoral dissertation, New York University.

Terzi, A. (1999) “Clitic Combinations, their Hosts, and their Ordering,” Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 17, 85-121.

Zyman, E. and N. Kalivoda (2020) "XP- and X0-movement in the Latin verb: Evidence from mirroring and anti-mirroring," Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 5(1): 20. 1–38.