Year: 2018
Type: article
Abstract: Harris and Halle (2005) present a framework (Generalized Reduplication) that unites the treatment of phonological reduplication and metathesis with similar phenomena in morphology, thereby accounting for the apparently spurious placement of the imperative plural - n in mesoclitic Spanish forms such as hága-lo-n ‘Do it!’, in which clitic lo is sandwiched between the verbal stem and the plural suffix. Kayne (2010) has challenged their analysis, arguing that such cases should be treated purely within the syntax. We reassess some of Kayne’s arguments, agreeing with his conclusion that the most important desideratum of any general analysis of such phenomena is restrictiveness. However, we contend that greater restrictiveness can be achieved through morphotactic constraints and repairs in the Generalized Reduplication formalism, triggered by a Noninitiality constraint on the positioning of the plural affix, and we develop constraints on these operations that situate interspeaker variation within the postsyntactic component.
Source: Linguistic Inquiry
DOI: 10.1162/ling_a_00286
Authors: Karlos Arregi, Andrew Nevins
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2842474745