Johns Hopkins University – Homewood Campus – (410-516-5250/office phone)
Thursday, February 16, 2006
3:30 p.m.
(Refreshments served at 3:15 p.m.)
University of Pennsylvania
“Combinatorics and Competition in Word/Phrase Interactions”
Canonical cases of "blocking"-- the relationship between _glory_ and_*gloriosity_-- are taken by Aronoff (1976) and much subsequent work as instances of word/word competition: the special, memorized form _glory_ occupies a space that derived _gloriosity_ would occupy, rendering the latter ungrammatical. Poser (1992) argues that such an account might have to be extended to word/phrase competition, in light of relationships between 'analytic' and 'synthetic' forms like _smarter_ and _*more smart_. Concentrating on English comparative/superlative formation, this talk consider two options for accounting for such interactions. Poser (1992) and others implement analytic/synthetic alternations as blocking ("Poser Blocking"): words beat phrases under certain circumstances. Syntactic theories like Distributed Morphology account for such patterns in terms of the combinatorics. Both synthetic (_smarter_) and analytic (_more intelligent_) comparatives have the same syntactic structures, but a rule of affixation applies in one case but not the other. There is no blocking (here or elsewhere, for that matter).
Each type of theory has something to say about the relevant interactions, but they make different predictions about the structural locality conditions under which they are expected. Thus the matter can be settled empirically. I argue in this talk that the non-competition approach within Distributed Morphology makes the correct predictions, and discuss how these results might be generalized.
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