Stronger locality, stronger theory
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Requested lectures |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Attached files | |
| Description | One of the goals of a linguistic theory is to restrict the set of possible hypotheses that a child may entertain when acquiring a language. In morphology, one of the most prominent restrictions of this kind is the Adjacency Condition on allomorphy (Siegel 1978, Embick 2010, Bobaljik 2012). The adjacency condition says that in a string of morphemes ? ... ß ... ?, morpheme ? cannot influence ? across ß (and vice versa). This notion of locality has been challenged by Moskal & Smith (2016), or Choi & Harley (2019), among others. They present cases where ? and ? appear to interact across ß. Their solution is to abandon linear adjacency and allow realisation rules (like the one in (2)) where the realisation of ? can be sensitive to ?. An assumption of this approach is that when morphological locality is loosened like this, the resulting system automatically covers both the non-local cases and the local cases, such that, in effect, loosening the locality restrictions creates a stronger theory with greater empirical coverage. In the talk, I discuss a complementary set of cases, which show that this is not always the case (see also Caha 2024, and Caha et al. 2024). Specifically, I discuss a case where a strictly local theory like the one used in Nanosyntax (Starke 2018) provides a larger empirical coverage than a theory based on non-local statements. |
| Related projects: |