Aspectual phase heads in Muskogee verbs
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Aspectual phase heads in Muskogee verbs Peter Ara Guekguezian1
Received: 16 October 2019 / Accepted: 31 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Current phasal models of words differ from one another in two main ways: which heads are phasal and whether a phase head allows higher heads to access its complement. Through an investigation of verbs in Muskogee, this paper argues that in some languages, words have functional phase heads that divide them into two domains and that block all higher heads from access to morphemes. Specifically, Muskogee verbs contain aspectual phase heads (Asp0 ), which separate the verb into a sub-aspectual, VP-level domain—Phase One (1)—and a superaspectual, InflPlevel domain—Phase Two (2). As previous work on Muskogee has shown, 1 (the ‘Stem’ in previous literature) and 2 form separate domains both in phonology, affecting stress and tone patterns, and in temporal semantics. This paper makes the novel observation that morphemes in 1 and 2 do not interact with each other in rules of allomorphy or allosemy, despite widespread interaction within each domain. An Asp0 phase head that follows the strong PIC1 accounts for the lack of interaction between 1 and 2. Categorizers, which are typically taken to be phase heads, behave differently from Asp0 in Muskogee, though their phasal status is unclear. Keywords Phase theory · Distributed morphology · Minimalism · Muskogean · Aspect
1 Introduction Many current morphological theories in the Minimalist framework (Chomsky 1993, 1995) derive words by morphosyntactic cycles or phases, including Distributed Morphology (DM; Halle and Marantz 1993; e.g., Marantz 2001, 2007; Marvin 2002;
B P.A. Guekguezian
[email protected]; [email protected]
1
Department of Linguistics, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, USA
P.A. Guekguezian Table 1 Functional and categorizing models of phases Categorizing model
Functional model
Categorizing phase heads: v, n, a
Functional phase heads: C, D, P, transitive v∗
Phase heads allow some higher heads from access into complements
Phase heads block all higher heads from access into complements
Embick 2010), Exoskeletal Syntax (e.g., Borer 2005) and Nanosyntax (e.g., Ramchand 2008; Caha 2009; Starke 2010). Despite sharing cyclic morphosyntax, these models differ from one another and from syntactic phasal models (e.g., Chomsky 2000, 2001). This paper investigates two points of difference between phasal models: (1) the identity of phase heads inside the word, and (2) whether a phase head blocks all higher heads from accessing its complement. DM models typically focus on the categorizers v, n and a as phase heads and argue that they allow access to their complements up to the next phase head (e.g., Marantz 2007; Embick 2010, 2013). Syntactic phasal models, on the other hand, typically focus on other functional heads as phasal, including C, D, P, and transitive v∗ , and argue that a phase head blocks all higher heads from accessing its complement (e.g., Chomsky 2000, 2004; Abels 2
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