Research Groups: Week of July 20-24

Wednesday, July 22, 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM: Syntax Group

Guest speaker: Dan Siddiqi (Carleton University), presenting work with Paul Melchin (University of Ottawa) and Ash Asudeh (Carleton University): "Ojibwe agreement in lexical-realizational functional grammar."

In this talk, we offer an analysis of Ojibwe agreement in a theory we call Lexical-Realizational Functional Grammar (LRFG), the offspring of an unlikely marriage between Distributed Morphology as a theory of morphological realization and Lexical-Functional Grammar as a theory of syntax and grammatical architecture. Distributed Morphology (DM; Halle and Marantz 1993) has heretofore been associated with theory of syntax derived from the Minimalist Program (MP; Chomsky 1995). But the primary insights of DM are not inherently bound to Minimalism - the two frameworks remain associated mostly just as an accident of their common origins. At its core, DM is a realizational, morpheme-based theory of morphology in which word-formation takes place through ordinary syntactic rules and processes. Syntactic terminal nodes contain only abstract morphosyntactic features, which are realized by vocabulary items. While for historical reasons DM has always been associated with a Minimalist framework, we claim the insights of DM can be integrated into a completely different theoretical framework, namely Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG; Bresnan et al. 2016). The resulting theory, LRFG, combines the strengths of the two frameworks. Like LFG, it is a representational and constraint-based theory (without the bottom-up, phase-based derivations of MP) that is ideally suited to modelling nonconfigurationality. Like DM, it provides a realizational, morpheme-based view of word-formation and is good at modelling complex morphological structures including those found in polysynthetic languages, such as Ojibwe. We demonstrate LRFG by analyzing Ojibwe agreement morphology as a case study. We take insights from syntactic analyses of Ojibwe verbal morphology (including Déchaine 1999; Oxford 2014, 2019; Barrie and Mathieu 2016) regarding the categories and featural content of the relevant morphemes and adapt them to our LFG-style formalism. We show that it is possible to provide a syntactic analysis of Ojibwe agreement and the direct-inverse system without relying on the derivational tools used by the above authors, namely without (head or phrasal) movement, articulated agreement probes, feature valuation and impoverishment, and so on. Instead, we put to use the tools available to LFG, including its correspondences between distinct modular structures and LFG’s templates (Dalrymple et al. 2004), along with the featural specifications of DM’s Vocabulary Items and the rules of exponence we have formulated for LRFG (building on the theory of Spanning, as in Ramchand 2008; Merchant 2013; Haugen and Siddiqi 2016; Svenonius 2016). We also demonstrate that the morphology of a polysynthetic language can be analyzed as a complex phrasal structure, mirroring the clausal structures of more familiar languages, without relying on derivational processes.