Constraints on Linearization in Nominal Modification

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Hedde Zeijlstra, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 503882358

It is a well-known observation that, in many languages, prenominal modifiers, such as attributively used adjectives, do not allow other material between them and their head nouns. Thus, 'the afraid of the doctor patient' is fully ungrammatical in English. Scholars have taken this fact to introduce the so-called Head-Final Filter (HFF) that bars post-head material in prenominal modifiers. At the same time, this constraint is both too strong and too weak. First, there are languages, like Greek or Russian, in which the HFF-violating A-XP-N order is in fact allowed, which means that the HFF overgenerates. Second, there are languages, like Basque, where postnominal modifiers, which fall outside the domain of the application of the HFF, are subject to an analogous restriction that requires them to be head-initial and disallows the mirrored N-XP-A order. In this respect, the HFF undergenerates.Basing ourselves on earlier work (Alexeyenko & Zeijlstra 2021), we hypothesize that what underlies these HFF-effects is an interaction between the morphological status of attributive heads and the features that adjectives display in their predicative forms. Only if predicative adjectives do not display all the features that are active in the DP and if the attributive marker is affixal in nature, HFF-effects emerge.While such a generalization already holds for a limited set of languages, this hypothesis cannot be fully confirmed yet. For that, a large-scale cross-linguistic survey with a language sample representing all relevant language families is needed, as is a theoretical analysis that explains why such a generalization holds. This is exactly what we will carry out in this project. We will investigate to what extent this generalization holds or whether it is in need of refinement and we will provide an explanation of why the interface between the morphological status of attributive morphemes and the features that are active on adjectives plays such a major role in licensing particular linearization patterns.The outcomes of these investigations will not only yield a better understanding of the way that complex nominal expressions can be linearized, but also create new insights with respect to the relation between morphological and syntactic operations and the features that underlie them.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants