Advances in Morphology 9783110886733, 9783110148534

Table of contents :
Introduction
The morphology-syntax interface: A study of autonomy
Inflectional morphology and functional heads
Cluster morphology
Dutch prefixes and prepositions in complex verbs
Selection and derivational affixes
Morphologie dérivationnelle et analyse sémantique des mots construits: Les voies de la référence ne sont pas impénétrables
One (more) reason why we need morphology
Grammatical cases, basic verbal construction, and voice in Maasai: Towards a better analysis of the concepts
On the morphological category of gender in Catalan and in Spanish
Markedness and productivity
Subject index

Citation preview

Advances in Morphology

W G DE

Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs 97

Editor

Werner Winter

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

Advances in Morphology

Edited by

Wolfgang U. Dressier Martin Prinzhorn John R. Rennison

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

1997

Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin.

© Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress

Cataloging-in-Publication-Data

Advances in morphology / edited by Wolfgang U. Dressier, Martin Prinzhorn, John R. Rennison. p. cm. - (Trends in linguistics. Studies and monographs ; 97) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 3-11-014853-6 (alk. paper) 1. Grammar, Comparative and general - Morphology. I. Dressier, Wolfgang U., 1939II. Prinzhorn, Martin. III. Rennison, John R. IV. Series. P241.A37 1996 415-dc20 96-42275 CIP

Die Deutsche Bibliothek -

Cataloging-in-Publication-Data

Advances in morphology / ed. by Wolfgang U. Dressier .... Berlin ; New York : Mouton de Gruyter, 1997 (Trends in linguistics : Studies and monographs ; 97) ISBN 3-11-014853-6 Gb.

© Copyright 1997 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Typesetting and printing: Arthur Collignon GmbH, Berlin. Binding: Lüderitz & Bauer, Berlin. Printed in Germany.

Contents

Introduction Wolfgang U. Dressier — Martin Prinzhorn — John Rennison

1

The morphology-syntax interface: A study of autonomy Hagit Borer

5

Inflectional morphology and functional heads Andrew Spencer

31

Cluster morphology Aaron Halpern

51

Dutch prefixes and prepositions in complex verbs Wiecher Zwanenburg

63

Selection andDiderivational affixes Anna-Maria Sciullo 79 Morphologie derivationnelle et analyse semantique des mots construits: Les voies de la reference ne sont pas impenetrates Georgette Dal — Martine Temple 97 One (more) reason why we need morphology Kersti Börjars 111 Grammatical cases, basic verbal construction, and voice in Maasai: Towards a better analysis of the concepts Igor Mel'cuk

131

On the morphological category of gender in Catalan and in Spanish Maria-Rosa Lloret — Joaquim Viaplana

171

Markedness and productivity Harald Baayen

189

Subject index

201

Introduction Wolfgang U. Dressier - Martin Prinzhorn — John Rennison

The Fifth International Morphology Meeting was held in Krems, Austria from 7th to 9th of July 1992, partially overlapping with the Seventh International Phonology Meeting. The talks covered such different areas of morphological research as morphosyntax, morphopragmatics, morpho(pho)nology, computational morphology, diachronic morphology, psycho- and patholinguistic aspects of morphology. On the empirical side, non-Indoeuropean languages were prominently represented. This volume presents a selection of papers actually given at the meeting.* The first papers in this volume address the position of morphology vis ä vis syntax. Building on some of her previous work, Hagit Borer defends an autonomous status of morphology in grammar. The view presented in this paper does not refer to autonomy in a derivational sense (i.e., morphology "before" syntax) but rather to a set of conditions applying parallel to other modules of grammar. The main goal of the paper is to define a notion of morphological relatedness, which does not assume a derivational relation between two forms. Based on the discussion of result nominals vs. process nominals in English and Hebrew, a model is defended which allows for the parallel assignment of both syntactic and morphological structures. On the morphological level both types of nominals are argued to have the same structure and the presence or absence of a syntactic structure will determine the process or resultative character of the nominal. Andrew Spencer's paper critically examines the implicit subsumption of inflectional morphology under a complex structure of functional heads in recent generative literature. His starting point is the analysis of diachronic development of inflectional morphology. The "functional-heads approach to inflection" forces a view of a very strong parallelism between syntactic and morphological change. Based on a discussion of the historical change of the Chukotko-Kamachatkan tense/aspect system, Spencer chows that the model can not capture morphosemantic reinterpretation, since syntactic structure plays no role in a formation of, for example, a present tense from an existing adjectival construction. Another problem

2

Wolfgang U. Dressler — Martin Prinzhorn — John Rennison

for the functional-heads approach are repeated formatives, since there is no obvious way how the mapping of several morphemes to one syntactic head should work. A particularly significant case in question are Icelandic postpositive articles discussed in the paper. The problem of the mapping between morphemes and constituents is also at the center of Aaron Halpern's paper "Cluster morphology". It is proposed that a set of bound morphemes can select for one morphological cluster. Based on the complex inflectional system of the Athabaskan language Sekani, Halpern argues that the class of conjunct morphemes forms a morphological constituent by subcategorizing one another and by subcategorizing (at a later point) a common syntactic host. This analysis is extended to clitic clusters on the basis of their morphological behavior. Morphological ordering seems to be needed and a purely syntactic account of affix ordering is rejected. Wiecher Zwanenburg's paper discusses the X-bar status of verbal prefixes in Dutch. These verb-forming prefixes pose a serious problem for Williams' right-hand head rule. In the paper a treatment of the prefixes as non-heads is proposed on the grounds of the functional parallelism between prefixes and prepositions. Both can function as left-handed nonheads and they can select an argument position, which, in the case of the complex verb, can be saturated word-externally. One conceptual advantage of this view is that the category Ρ does not remain the only lexical category which is only involved in compounding but not in derivation. Also prefixes are not treated as categoryless items but as Ps. On a comparative view, systematic differences between French and Dutch are related to the obligatory non-headedness of prefixes in Dutch. Anna-Maria Di Sciullo's paper "Selection and derivational affixes" argues against a purely categorial selection in derivational morphology. Following recent work on the need of a more refined argument structure in syntax, she shows that in derivational morphology, too, semantic and conceptual information has to be available for selection and therefore encoded in a complex argument structure. A derivational affix selects a predicate on the basis of the configurational properties of the argument structure. The distributional properties of the suffix -able are presented in detail, and it is argued that this suffix selects a predicate with an e(vent)-place, thereby excluding auxiliaries, modals, Stative verbs and individual level predicates. The restrictions that a derivational affix imposes on the argument structure include conceptual, aspectual and categorial information. "Morphologie derivationelle et analyse semantique des mots construits: les voies de la reference ne sont par impenetrables" by Georgette Dal

Introduction

3

and Martine Temple explores the referential properties of derived nouns like viennoiserie. The derivation of such words in -erie is explained on a formal and semantic level in the framework of Corbin's model of derivational associative morphology and for lexicographic purposes. The authors study the interplay between derivationally constructed meaning (word-formation meaning) and lexical reference (word meaning on the four levels of the input, of the output of the derivation, in its word meaning and in its reference. Contextual information is encoded in order to make the analysis usable for a computer lexicon. The grammatical status of postnominal definiteness markers in the Scandinavian languages and in various Balkan languages is explored in Kersti Börjars' paper "One (more) reason why we need morphology". Recent syntactic analyses suggest that incorporated definite determiners (as in Rom. om-ul'the man') are derived by syntactic incorporation into a functional head. After applying several tests wtih respect to the distinction between clitics and affixes, Börjars shows that there are not only cases of morphological affixes and syntactic clitics but also mixed cases where the elements behave partly like clitics and partly like affixes. In order to capture all those variants, a purely syntactic analysis is rejected and an analysis based on Sadock's Auto-Lexical Syntax is suggested which can not only capture the gradual distinctions but also the common characteristics of definiteness markers. Igor Mel'cuk's article deals with three grammatical phenomena in Maasai, an Eastern Nilotic language. Case and voice are analyzed in a close relation: case marks different surface-syntactic roles in NPs, whereas voice of the verb determines which N P plays which surface-syntactic role. The predicative construction as the basic verbal construction of the language is derived from properties of voice. Case and syntactic role are kept distinct, a given syntactic role can be realized by several cases and a given case can mark several syntactic roles. If case is defined in such a way, a less typologically marked analysis of the language becomes possible. The basic verbal construction can then by analyzed as ergative, a conclusion which is supported by diachronic considerations. In the appendix, a calculus of possible grammatical voices is presented. Based on a comparative analysis of the morphological category gender in Catalan and Spanish, Maria-Rosa Lloret and Joaquim Viaplana discuss the traditional view of gender as consisting of two categories, masculine and feminine, and the generative view of gender being a binary feature [ + / — fem]. Since in Catalan, schwa is the only overt gender marker for feminine, gender is argued to be a privative category in this language.

4

Wolfgang U. Dressler — Martin Prinzhorn — John Rennison

In Spanish, gender is interpreted as an opposition (gender marking rules assign /a/ to feminines and lot to masculines), either in terms of binary features or in terms of privative features. Unexpected endings are accounted for as being stem extensions (or word markers), blocking the application of the proper gender marker. The analysis thus combines a traditional gender approach with the generative word-marker proposal. Harald Baayen's paper "Markedness and productivity" examines the question whether unmarked affixes are more productive than their marked counterparts on the basis of lexical statistics and psycholinguistic experimentation. He discusses Dutch suffixes, the agentive suffix -er and its feminine counterpart -ster. The latter one seems to be both formally and semantically the marked case, since it requires formations in -er as input and it has a more restricted meaning. It turns out, however, that according to a quantitative formalization of degree of productivity, the marked suffix is the more productive one. The higher degree of productivity of -ster is a consequence of its marked nature. This conclusion is supported by a production experiment. * The organizers would like to thank the Bundesministerium für Wissenschaft und Forschung, the Niederösterreichische Landesregierung, and the University of Vienna for their financial support, and Martina Wiltschko for editorial help.

The morphology-syntax interface: A study of autonomy1 Hagit Borer

1. Parallel Morphology The question of the morphology/syntax interface, an important linguistic battleground in the sixties and early seventies, but inert in the following decade, emerged with renewed force in the mid eighties. Work done on the lexicon during the seventies and the eighties has resulted in important structural insights into the nature of word formation, thus strengthening the claim that morphology is an autonomous module. On the other hand, work done in syntax during the same period resulted in the emergence of systems which strongly mandate the syntactic projection of predicateargument structure correlations which are at times word-internal. Such syntactic systems further incorporate formal devices (to wit, head-to-head movement) capable of relating syntactially (rather than morphologically) affixes and stems, so as to form words. Thus an old question is raised again: Is morphology an independent module, subject to restrictions all its own, or should it be subsumed under syntax, its formal properties reflecting syntactic conditions which are independently motivated? Those of us who believe that morphology is an independent, autonomous component, must now consider anew the interaction of such a component with predicate-argument relations and syntax. I have argued elsewhere (cf. Borer 1991) that the attempt to reduce morphology to syntax is formally problematic, and that hierarchical notions such as "head" and "subcategorization", which have been used both in syntax and in morphology, in fact mean very different things and have very different formal properties (for additional discussion of some of these problems see Walinska de Hackbeil 1986). Recent attempts to reconcile these difficulties (e.g., Roberts 1991) result precisely in the introduction of a specialized syntax to deal with word formation. I will, in essence, assume the correctness of these conclusions, and will devote this

6

Hagit Borer

paper to the exploration of a particular mode of syntax-morphology interaction, which I will refer to as Parallel Morphology. In a nutshell, the central claim of Parallel Morphology is that while predicate-argument structure is projected syntactically in a systematic fashion, such projection is independent of the existence of an independent word-formation component. Word-formation would thus be deprived of various formal devices recently attributed to it, such as inheritance or argument-structure manipulation. It will, however, remain the locus of Word Formation, where by Word Formation the categorial formation of words is intended. 2 A scheme of the Parallel Morphology interactive model is given in (1): (1)

Word Formation Lex. list

-M.-projection


CiCCuC

=>

collection

b. CiCCuC

:

[NV-] BiSSeL cook

BiSSuL

'cooking'

Second, I assume that in the unmarked case, morphologically-derived forms do not inherit the argument structure of their non-head constituents. Thus, in a case of de-verbal nominals, we may not assume that the arguments of the verb are inherited by the derived nominal. While some cases do exist in which arguments of the non-head are inherited by the derived form, these cases, I assume, must be licensed independently. I will return to this point below.

2. The insertion of M-structures Suppose now that we insert the M-structures in (2a)-(2b) at D-structure. M-structures are not syntactically legible, and so the only syntacticly meaningful item in (2a)—(2b) would be the category specification associated with the root N. As a result, the syntactic projection of the M-structures in (2a)-(2b) would yield quite simply an N° heading an NP. I will return shortly to the properties of that Ν and the NP associated with it. Suppose, however, that we insert the M-structures in (2a)-(2b) at Sstructure. What exactly does that mean? Or more accurately, consider what it cannot mean.

8

Hagit Borer

First, there is an interpretation of the insertion of the M-structures in (2a)-(2b) at S-structure which is largely irrelevant syntactically. We could insert them into a fully articulated syntactic N P which does not dominate any terminals at D-structure. The M-structures are simply not inserted until the S-structure. There is no reason to assume, however, that such a derivation would have different syntactic properties from the derivation I referred to as a D-structure insertion, since syntactically, it would be non-distinct from it. The only difference would be at the level of the actual insertion of the phonological matrix, and it is not clear that such a difference has any interesting syntactic consequences. Consider another possibility, this time non-trivial. S-structure insertion of the M-structure in (2a)—(2b) could entail the generation at Dstructure of a VP dominated by-collect, or biSSel, which, following the insertion of the nominal affix ~(a)tion or CiCCuC would turn into an NP. A sort of word-forming syntactic transformation deriving (3b) from (3a) would be: (3)

a.

VP

b. V'

V collect

NP N' Ν collection

This derivation, quite compatible with early transformational models, entails a category change in the course of the syntactic derivation, and I assume this change to be unavailable on principled grounds. What I will assume for S-structure insertion, rather, is that S-structure insertion is not the insertion of a morpheme, or any other terminal. Rather, it is the insertion of an M-structure such as (2a)—(2b). Specifically, suppose all terminal-dominating X 0, s must be projected at D-structure, as part of the X'-schemata, and no subsequent operations may introduce any new ones. If that is the case, the insertion of the M-structures in (2a)—(2b) at S-structure is only possible if the building blocks they were composed of were already there at D-structure, although the Mstructure was not. The emerging structure follows proposals made by Baker (1985, 1988) for head-to-head movement. Specifically, note that if -{a)tion is inserted under N°, which is its only way to be present in the syntactic structure, it must project an NP, and that if collect is inserted under V°, which is again its only way to be syntactically present, it must project a NP:

The morphology-syntax interface (4)

9

NP N' Ν -tion CiCCuC

VP V' V collectBiSSeL

In a familiar fashion, collect will raise to -tion, as a syntactic operation. The output of this movement, and I stress, a syntactic movement creating a syntactic structure, meets the string adjacency which is necessary for the insertion of the M-structure in (2a). We may thus view the insertion of the M-structure in (2a) as a superimposition of an M-structure on a syntactic structure, ruled in unless these two co-existing structures result in a conflict in the phonological string. 5 The satisfaction of morphological subcategorization in (4) is by the M-structure, and the morphological insertion frame is not projected syntactically, unlike proposals made by Rizzi - Roberts (1989) and Roberts (1991), where morphological insertion frames are syntactically projected and met by substitution. Nor is this proposal the same as that implied by Baker (1988), in which, again, it is syntactic movement which satisfies morphological subcategorization. In essence, then, I am proposing that head-to-head movement is always an adjunction structure, and that morphological insertion frames, crucial building blocks in the construction of M-words, reside in the Word Formation component, and need not be projected syntactically at all. In order for their insertion into a syntactic tree to be licit, only adjacency is required. Such morphologically-needed adjacency is, of course, oblivious to syntactic distinctions such as substitution vs. adjunction, and the fact that it is achieved by head-adjunction is morphologically immaterial. Likewise, from the point of view of the Word Formation component the distinction between D-structure and S-structure is immaterial, these levels having no theoretical status whatsoever in that module. In the model illustrated in (1) there is absolutely no meaning to the statement that a morphological subcategorization need not be met until S-structure, as Baker's (1988) Stray-Affix Principle requires. As the Word Formation component is an independent component, the ordering of its operations follows restrictions all its own, and the output may then be "plugged"

10

Hag it Borer

into syntactic trees at any stage. While it is true that syntactic head-tohead movement may create the adjacency of morphemes which is required in order for the insertion of an M-structure to occur, this is a syntactic, rather than a morphological, fact. There is thus no sense in which the morphological operation is inherently ordered with respect to any particular syntactic level. Rather, it applies independently, and is inserted at different syntactic levels. Before I turn to the syntactic properties of these two insertion possibilities, note that the notion of autonomy advanced here is different from its traditional perception. Specifically, suppose a module is autonomous if a) it has a distinct set of primitives not found in other modules; b) it constitutes a coherent set of formal operations which are distinct from those found in other components. According to this notion of autonomy there is no particular need to maintain that two autonomous modules interact with one another at a fixed unique point, and that the output of the Word Formation component is the input to the syntax. Rather, different operations may apply to particular representations simultaneously, and different modules would be allowed to "look at" intermediate representations derived by other modules, without compromising this notion of autonomy. (For a similar notion of autonomy, see Grimshaw 1985.) Let us then assume that this is the way to characterize the interaction between word formation and syntax. These autonomous modules are available simultaneously, in a parallel fashion, each representation satisfying constraints presented by its own module. Strings formed by syntactic operations, for example, by head-to-head movement, may be available to the Word Formation component if they create a morphologically legible string, and likewise, strings formed by Word Formation operations, for example, roots of M-structures, are available to the syntax if they are syntactically legible, for example, they are syntactically projected categories. Given any string, then, such a string could be at one and the same time an M-structure and a syntactic constituent, having to satisfy syntactic well-formedness conditions on the one hand and morphological well-formedness conditions on the other hand. The availability of the insertion of (2a)-(2b) both at D-structure and at S-structure, coupled with the specific interpretation of the Atomicity Thesis advanced here and the absence of argument inheritance, results in a clear prediction: M-structures such as collection, biSSul, should exist in two distinct syntactic contexts: in one context, derived from D-structure insertion, an Ν is projected. The crucial property of a D-structure insertion is that only the root of the M-structure heads a phrasal projection.

The morphology-syntax

interface

11

Thus the V morphologically embedded with the Ν in (2) is not projected and is syntactically opaque. Such derived nominale are not expected to have any syntactic properties typically associated with verbs. In the second context, derived from S-structure insertion, on the other hand, we have an NP headed by -{a)tion or CiCCuC, and a fully projected VP headed by collect or BiSSeL respectively, as in (4). In this case, the derived nominal will appear to have properties asociated with a VP. However, such properties in the present account do not stem from the derived nominal at all. Rather, they stem from the full projection of a VP, whose head happened to have been incorporated into a nominal head. This point should be stressed: I do not postulate here derived nominals with verbal properties and argument structure alongside derived nominals without verbal properties and without argument structure. Derived nominals, as morphological structures, always have only the properties of nouns. Derived nominals corresponding to an S-structure insertion, however, will correlate with a syntactic structure containing a VP, as in (4), and whatever verbal properties associated with them are, in fact, reducible to the properties of that VP.

3. The syntax of derived nominals Now consider derived nominals in greater detail. In a comprehensive study of the typology of result-derived and process-derived nominals, Grimshaw (1990) proposes that the distinctions between the two are to be attributed to the fact that while the former do not have an argument structure, the latter do. In (5) some of the more salient differences between result- and process-derived nominals are given: (5)

Some distinctions between result and process nominals (Grimshaw 1990)

Result

Process

a. Non-0-assigner No obligatory arguments b. No event reading c. No agent-oriented modifiers

0-assigners Obligatory arguments Event reading Agent-oriented modifiers

12

Hagit Borer

Result

Process

d. Subjects are possessives e. by phrases are non-arguments In Spanish, selects de f. No implicit argument (event) control g. No aspectual modifiers h. Modifiers like frequent, constant only with plural i. May be plural

Subjects are arguments by phrases are arguments In Spanish, selects por Implicit argument (event) control Aspectual modifiers Modifiers like frequent, appear with singular Must be singular

constant

By way of exemplification, note that the sentences in (6) only have an event reading, while the sentences in (7) may not have such a reading. (8) and (9) exemplify some ungrammatical cases: (6)

a. b. c. d.

The instructor's (intentional) examination of the student The frequent collection of mushrooms (by students) The monitoring of wild flowers to document their disappearance The destruction of Rome in a day

(7)

a. The instructor's examination b. John's collections c. These frequent destructions took their toll.

(8)

a. * John's constant examinations of the students b. * Mary's frequent collection

(9)

a. *The collection to document the disappearance of mushrooms b. *The constant examination c. *The destruction in a day

Implementing a specific model of argument structure, Grimshaw proposes to account for this array of distinctions by assuming that resultderived nominals select R as an external argument (in the sense of Williams 1981), while process-derived nominals select an Ev (roughly event). The selection of R leads, in essence, to a referential reading. The selection of Ev leads, in essence, to an event reading. In such a system, referential elements may be taken to contrast with eventive elements in that they may not have an θ-grid, hence no argument structure, while nominals with Ev obligatorily have an argument structure. Grimshaw further assumes that the homophony between result nominals and process nomi-

The morphology-syntax

interface

13

nals is due to the systematic ambiguity of the bulk of nominalizing affixes between the R function and the Ev function. In what follows I will develop a different explanation for the properties of result and process nominals. I do, however, agree with what I take to be two essential insights of Grimshaw's work. First, that process-derived nominals are associated with an argument structure, while resultderived nominals are not, and that the range of distinctions illustrated in (5)—(9) derives largely from this distinction. Second, I agree with Grimshaw, and disagree with much research on derived nominals, that the argument structure of derived nominals is never optional. It is either there, as in process nominals, or missing, as in result nominals. In fact, I will even strengthen this conclusion in applying it systematically to subjects in derived nominals as well as to objects. I diverge from Grimshaw's account in suggesting that in process nominals, the event reading and the argument structure do not stem from the presence of an external Ev argument, but from the presence, in the syntactic representation, of a fully projected VP. A full critique of the advantages and disadvantages of Grimshaw's system is outside the scope of this paper. I may point out, however, one striking oddity: all the process nominals which Grimshaw refers to as "complex event nominals", those which have an argument structure, may be modified by aspectual modifiers, take argumental 6y-phrase etc., are de verbal. Although Grimshaw does mention a number of event nominals which are not deverbal (e. g., trip, race, journey, event, and others), she acknowledges that these do not share the properties of deverbal nominals: (10) a. b. c. d. e. f.

*The constant race to the mountains *The event in three hours * John's deliberate trip to the mountains *A race from the station by Mary *The trip to the desert in order to win a medal *The three different races from the stadium lasted a long time.

The existence of simple event nominals alongside complex event nominals raises an important question: why should only nominals derived from verbs exhibit the properties associated with fully developed argument structure and event modification, and why should these properties be completely absent from the entries of underived nominals, even when they denote an event? Looked at differently, it is entirely clear that process-derived nominals appear to retain (in essence) all the relevant prop-

14

Hagit Borer

erties of their source verb, including the possibility of event modification and argument structure. As in the case of simple event nominals there is no source verb with such properties, argument structure and event modification must be missing. But such a straightforward derivational correlation is extremely difficult to capture in the fully lexical approach assumed by Grimshaw. Within such an approach, we do not expect the presence of syntactic properties which may only be associated with derived entries, but not with underived ones. As the status of underived entries and derived entries is by definition one and the same in lexicalist approaches, lexical entries of derived forms and underived forms alike must, per force, avail themselves of the same inventory of lexical features and properties. Thus, the distinction between (derived) complex event nominals and simple event nominals suggests that the properties of derived-process nominals cannot and should not be explained merely by the presence of an Ev argument associated with the nominal, but rather, must be linked directly to the properties of the source V. On the other hand, the source V is active only in process nominals. In result nominals, its properties are entirely inert. An explanatory account of the result-process distinction must address the distinct behavior of the source verb in these distinct contexts. It is this strong correlation which the account presented here attempts to capture. Specifically, the following points will be argued: A. Derived nouns as such are never associated with an event reading and never assign 0-roles or select arguments, although they may, of course, have a possessor. Put differently, derived nominals never inherit the ΗΘgrid of the source verb. B. The appearance of an argument structure associated with processderived nominals results from the presence of a fully projected VP in these structures. It is the projected VP which assigns h-roles to the arguments, not the derived nominal. 6 C. In result-derived nominals there is no VP, and hence no argument structure, no event reading, and no inheritance of any sort. D. While Grimshaw's "simple-event nominals" denote events, as they are not associated with a syntactic VP, they do not have an argument structure and do not allow event modification, properties reserved to VPs. The fact that they denote an event has no syntactically relevant properties. E. In accordance with the model of Parallel Morphology, the morphological output of the rule deriving nominals from verbs may be inserted both at D-structure or at S-structure. In the former case, the inserted

The morphology-syntax

interface

15

structure would be an N°, heading an NP, selecting no arguments, having no event interpretation: a result nominal. In the case of S-structure insertion, such an insertion would take as its input a VP embedded under an NP and the result of head-to-head movement. In this latter case, the syntactically realized V assigns θ-roles in the usual fashion, and an event interpretation is available as expected. Contra Roeper (1983), Randall (1982), and many others, I reject explicitly the assumption that derived morphological forms inherit the argument structure of their non-heads, a hypothesis known as Inheritance, sometimes as the Lexical Projection Principle. Rather, I assume that morphological derivations as such do not preserve argument structure of non-head constituents. What, at times, appears to be the inheritance of argument structure is either due to the full syntactic projection of the non-head constituents, as in (4), or when the form has M-structure exclusively, due not to a general morphological inheritance, but rather, to the properties of particular morphological derivations. For example, it is generally assumed that attributive adjectives must have an external argument (cf. Higginbotham 1985). The need to conform to this well-formedness condition on the structure of adjectives results in the preservation of one of the verbal arguments when deriving an adjective from a verb (e.g., adjectival passive, as analyzed by Levin - Rappaport 1986) rather than from a general process of inheritance. Considering deverbal nouns, I propose that nouns need not have arguments (and possibly never have arguments) and as a result a deverbal nominal M-structure inherits none of the arguments of its embedded verb. Thus the properties of result nominals now follow directly from a Dstructure insertion. Following such an insertion, and given no inheritance, the only properties which are syntactically relevant are the categorial properties of the root Ν percolating from the nominal affix. These project a full phrasal NP, and nothing else. The resulting syntactic structure is simply, as in (11): (11) a. Mary's/The collection was

impressive.

Ν

b. det

N'

Mary's! the collection

16

Hagit Borer

An S-structure insertion, however, specifically entails an N P dominating a full VP projection. In (12), a fuller version of (4), the verb collect, in contrast with the derivation of result nominals, is projected syntactically at D-structure. Heading its own maximal projection, it must assign its arguments, and these must be projected: (12)

N" SPEC

N' Ν°

V° collect

V" N° tion

SPEC Haim