Negative verb clusters in Mari and Udmurt and why they require postsyntactic top-down word-formation

Ekaterina Georgieva,Philipp Weisser,Martin Salzmann

doi:10.1007/s11049-020-09484-w

Abstract

In this paper, we provide an in-depth study of the morphosyntactic behavior of negative verb clusters in the Finno-Ugric languages Udmurt and Mari. We argue that the standard treatment of negation as an auxiliary is inadequate for these languages as it does not explain its morphosyntactic and morphophonological behavior, which presents a challenging morphology-syntax-semantics mismatch: Despite taking high scope and governing the highest verb of the clause, negation surfaces immediately before the highest verb rather than at the end of the verb cluster as would be expected in head-final languages. Furthermore, we show that negation forms a complex unit with the highest verb of the clause and thus crucially differs from negative auxiliaries in other Finno-Ugric languages like Finnish and from other auxiliaries. We argue that the properties of negation are best modelled by means of postsyntactic Lowering (Embick and Noyer 2001). Next to the semantic vacuousness of the displacement, the main arguments for a postsyntactic perspective come from the internal constituency of the verb cluster, the possibility to interleave clitics inside the verb cluster only in the presence of negation, and cases where Lowering fails and a syntacto-semantically inert copula is inserted as a repair. We show that competing approaches to complex head formation based on narrow-syntactic head-movement, flexible spell-out in different positions or base-generation fail to capture the crucial properties of negative verb clusters. On a more general level, we thus provide evidence for the necessity of post-syntactic mechanisms for word formation and a serial architecture of the morphology-syntax interface.

Highlights

IntroductionOne often encounters mismatches between the syntax and semantics on the one hand and the morphology on the other
While describing languages, one often encounters mismatches between the syntax and semantics on the one hand and the morphology on the other
The arguments we provide in favor of a postsyntactic Lowering account involve (i) the semantic vacuousness of the Lowering operation, (ii) the constituency of the complex head with negation and T forming a constituent to the exclusion of the verb, (iii) the possibility to interleave adverbial clitics in the verbal cluster in Udmurt only in the presence of negation as well as (iv) the insertion of a dummy copula in Mari in cases where Lowering fails

Summary

Introduction

One often encounters mismatches between the syntax and semantics on the one hand and the morphology on the other. Theories of the mapping between morphology and syntax need to provide a number of tools to resolve these kinds of mismatches. This is true for realizational, late insertion-type frameworks where the syntactic base structure is built up with no recourse to morphological considerations whatsoever. Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993), which is probably the most elaborated proposal of this type, maintains several operations to manipulate the syntactic structure to match morphological requirements. Such operations include head-movement, Lowering, Local Dislocation and Fission and Fusion. It comes as no surprise that one of the major points of criticism concerning Distributed Morphology is the relatively large inventory of this kind of manipulative postsyntactic operations, see, e.g., Bruening (2017)

Objectives

Discussion

Conclusion