Abstract for David Embick's talk

Linearization asymmetries revealed by post-syntactic readjustment
David Embick (University of Pennsylvania)
October 6, 2005 (Thursday)
4:15 PM - ; Room 6417, the CUNY Graduate Center

In Non-Lexicalist theories of grammar such as Distributed Morphology, the "word" is not an architecturally priviliged object in the way that it is in alternative Lexical approaches to syntax and morphology. At the same time, there are clear differences in grammatical behavior between (the contents of) syntactic heads and larger objects. The present talk investigates some special properties of complex heads in the domain of postsyntactic readjustments. The readjustments in question are movement processes that affix one element to another under conditions of string adjacency. Different case-studies involving this kind of _Local Dislocation_ are examined, and it is shown that a number of different assumptions are required for the proper formulation of string-adjacent movement. Of particular interest are assumptions that make 'words' (complex heads) look special: for instance, pieces do not move outside of complex heads, and when a complex head moves, only other complex heads, and not their subparts, are visible for the movement. When the mechanics of linearization are examined in detail, these apparently distinct assumptions can be reduced to the single claim that head-internal linear order and head-external linear order do not interact, in a way that I make precise.