Fully Distributing Morphology: The Phonology and Syntax of Latin Case Inflections
Joseph Embley Emonds, Philip Spaelti · Institutional Repositories DataBase (IRDB) · 2005
Certain executions of minimalist syntax use "uninterpretable formal features:* This term raises the question, do there really exist features of morpho-syntax that are em never interpretable, that play a role in neither Logical Form nor Phonological Form?Case features are in our view best analyzed as categorical head features that are realized on adjacent DPs.Case features are therefore uninterpretable only when they are not in their base positions; in theh• base position, they are simply categories such as V and P, and are interpretable.However, lexical features such as declension classes cannot be analyzed as "alternative realizations" of this sort, and so might be examples of purely "iin interpretable fonnal features."We argue that Latin noun and adjective declension class feature bundles (e.g., [3"/ declension, ablative, singular r ) are all better reanalyzed, on independent grounds, as spell outs of case and number suffixes whose forms depend only on the phonological features of the final segment of a preceding stem.Moreover, in almost all situations, these dependencies are phonetically natural.The "6 declension classes" of Latin are simply contextual variants fully determined by 6 possible values of preceding underlying final segments: consonants and 5 distinct vowels.That is, we argue that spell outs of features complexes such as [OBLIQUE, ±PLURAL] or [GENITIVE, ±PLURAL] do not depend on arbitrary uninterpretable morpheme class features.We claim rather that such constructs, at least in the well known Latin inflectional system, are entirely superfluous.1. Autonomous vs. Distributed Morphology Linguists universally acknowledge that the categories and hence the combinatorial principles of syntax and phonology differ; they are largely and perhaps totally disjoint.'Moreover, a possible claim about natural language is that all categories of phonology and syntax are interpretable, at least in most of their uses, at their respective interfaces with pronunciation (Phonological Form or PF) and understanding and use (Logical Form or LF).1Hockett's (1960) study of language universals called this natural language property "duality of patterning ."This duality may be the basis of human language itself: Primates seem to have a potential lexicon of say c. 102 minimal distinct calls or signs.By human duality of patterning, roughly the same number of minimal units (meaningless phonemes) can combine in sequences to make up a much larger number of minimal meaningful units (morphemes).If simple lexical entries contain say two syllables in a system of say 20 consonants and 5 vowels, this permits 20 x 5 x 20 x 5 = 10, 000 items, which is sufficient to generate what we might consider a minimal natural language.