Abstract
Recent work on allomorphy has tried to propose various notions of locality domains in order to constrain the relation between the trigger and the target of allomorphy. However, unless we have a way to clearly distinguish between allomorphy and cases of syntactic agreement, this approach is bound to fail as one can never tell whether a given alternation is due to agreement or non-local allomorphy. The goal of this paper is thus to provide a set of coherent diagnostics to distinguish the two phenomena empirically. In order to do this, I provide three case studies about phenomena previously analyzed as instances of agreement. For each of these cases, I argue that an analysis in terms of allomorphy is empirically more adequate for a number of reasons. Since two of these case studies involve phenomena where the trigger and the target of allomorphy are not part of the same word, the present paper also substantiates the claim that context-sensitive spell-out phenomena are not restricted to words. Building on these case studies, the final section revisits six diagnostics that can be applied to a given alternation to determine whether it is an instance of allomorphy or agreement.
Highlights
Recent years have seen an increased interest in the phenomena of allomorphy and suppletion
Bobaljik & Harley argue in detail that the pattern found in Hiaki should not be derived by means of syntactic agreement but rather by means of context-sensitive spell-out rules of the type used for allomorphy or suppletion
I would like to submit that the type of features that govern a given alternation might serve as a diagnostic to determine whether we are dealing with an instance of allomorphy or with an instance of agreement
Summary
Recent years have seen an increased interest in the phenomena of allomorphy and suppletion. Ackema & Neeleman (2003; 2004) give quite a number of phenomena which, as they argue, should receive an analysis in terms of contextsensitive spell-out rather than actual syntactic agreement The phenomena they discuss include pronoun alternations (cliticizing vs free pronouns) and certain agreement alternations depending on word order in Dutch or Arabic. Bobaljik & Harley argue in detail that the pattern found in Hiaki should not be derived by means of syntactic agreement but rather by means of context-sensitive spell-out rules of the type used for allomorphy or suppletion. I will proceed as follows: Each of the three subsections of Section 2 will discuss an instance of allomorphy which has previously been misanalyzed as syntactic agreement For each of these instances, I will provide arguments that a morphological analysis in terms of allomorphy is preferable.
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