Open AccessClassic problems at the syntax-morphology interface: Whose are they?
Author(s) -
Greville G. Corbett
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
proceedings of the international conference on head-driven phrase structure grammar
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1535-1793
DOI - 10.21248/hpsg.2010.14
Subject(s) - syntax , morphology (biology) , computer science , typology , redundancy (engineering) , syncretism (linguistics) , lexicon , interface (matter) , linguistics , artificial intelligence , history , philosophy , genetics , archaeology , bubble , maximum bubble pressure method , parallel computing , biology , operating system
There are fascinating problems at the syntax-morphology interface which tend to be missed. I offer abrief explanation of why that may be happening, then give a Canonical Typology perspective, whichbrings these problems to the fore. I give examples showing that the phenomena could in principle betreated either by syntactic rules (but these would be complex) or within morphology (but this wouldinvolve redundancy). Thus ˋnon-autonomous' case values, those which have no unique form but arerealized by patterns of syncretism, could be handled by a rule of syntax (one with access to otherfeatures, such as number) or by morphology (with resulting systematic syncretisms). I concentrate onone of the most striking sets of data, the issue of prepositional government in Latvian, and outlinea solution within Network Morphology using structured case values.