Meaning and grammar seminar

Speakers:

• Paul Melchin (University of Ottawa)
• Ash Asudeh (University of Rochester)
• Michael Everdell (University of Texas)
• Daniel Siddiqi (Carleton University)

Title: LrFG: Implementing realizational morphosyntax in a constraint-based framework

Abstract: In this talk, we offer a theory we call Lexical-Realizational Functional Grammar (LRFG), the offspring of an unlikely marriage between Distributed Morphology (DM; Halle & Marantz 1993) as a theory of morphological realization and Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG; Kaplan & Bresnan 1982) as a theory of syntax and grammatical architecture. 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 and O’dam.

We demonstrate LRFG with case studies of two North American Indigenous languages, Ojibwe (Algonquian) and O’dam (Uto-Aztecan). The first is an analysis of Ojibwe agreement morphology. We take insights from syntactic analyses of Ojibwe verbal morphology (including Déchaine 1999; Oxford 2014, 2019; Barrie & Mathieu 2016) regarding the categories and featural content of the relevant morphemes and adapt them to the LRFG formalism, which is inherited from LFG. We show that it is possible to provide a syntactic analysis of Ojibwe agreement and the direct-inverse system using 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 by building on the theory of Spanning (Ramchand 2008) as developed in Merchant (2013) and Haugen & Siddiqi (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.

The second case study is an analysis of O’dam preverbal quantifiers. In general, these quantifiers can be used as a diagnostic for argumenthood; however, there are some cases where this diagnostic disagrees with other argumenthood diagnostics, particularly verbal argument co-reference. Analyses of this phenomenon in Minimalist DM and LFG are possible, but unsatisfactory. The derivational nature of a Minimalist analysis would require that all arguments are severed from the verb, a la Wood (2014), without the standard associated binding phenomena or other evidence for this move. The constraint- based nature of an analysis in LFG involving syntactic quantification features is available without such structural assumptions, but the distribution of these features is essentially stipulated. On the other hand, an LRFG analysis allows for a principled account of these quantification features based on argumenthood, while accounting for the mismatches between argumenthood tests via the realization mechanism. Thus, the O’dam case study demonstrates a situation where LRFG gives a more principled analysis of the data than either standard DM or LFG.