Project Details
Projekt
Cyclicity in Inflectional Morphology
Subject Area
General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
Term
since 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 439622645
This project is a continuation of ``Prospects of Inflectional Morphology in Harmonic Serialism'', in which the goal was to show that the pre-syntactic lexical-realizational developed model in Müller (2020) can cover roughly the same ground as more established models like Distributed Morphology or Paradigm Function Morphology. At the same time the goal was to show that the approach can offer new and convincing solutions in the areas of impoverishment, exponent drop, deponency, paradigmatic gaps, and morphological movement. The harmonic serialist approach connects cyclicity (both cyclic operations in the morphology as well as cyclic interactions between morphology and phonology) with optimization (with optimality-theoretic determinations of well-formed outputs during the derivation). In the course of answering the research questions, the focus of the project increasingly shifted to the aspect of cyclicity. In addition, it has become clear that for many questions the difference between pre- and post-syntactic morphology is far less decisive than is often assumed; apart from this, for various phenomena under consideration, it has been shown that a direct influence of syntactic operations on morphological realization is not implausible. Against this background, the second phase of the project shifts in focus towards the concept of cyclicity, within the framework of the post-syntactic lexical-realization model of Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz (1994); Kramer, Alexiadou, Marantz & Oltra-Massuet (2025)), while continuing to consider of optimization methods. These further thematic developments are accompanied by the addition of a second principal investigator, whose research focuses on the role of cyclicity in inflectional morphology (Fenger (2020)). On closer inspection, it turns out that cyclicity is indeed a key factor in serial lexical-realizational theories such as Distributed Morphology, but that a detailed examination of this concept with reference to grammatical building blocks such as the Cyclic Principle and the Strict Cycle beyond Bobaljik (2000) has not yet been accomplished and there are a large number of open questions that will be addressed in the second phase of the project, e.g., with regard to impoverishment, extended exponence and contextual allomorphy, deponency, overabundance, periphrasis, portmanteaux, and agreement exponents. A guiding idea throughout will be that given cyclic spell-out, morphological realization in many cases has to cope with incomplete or defective sets of morpho-syntactic features.
DFG Programme
Research Units
Subproject of
FOR 5175:
Cyclic Optimization
