Abstract for Benjamin Flight's talk

Re-Distributed Morphology: What minimalism has to say about the pieces of inflection
Benjamin Flight (Toronto)
March 28, 2006 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

Distributed Morphology and Minimalism are often thought to be compatible frameworks. However, I will present research that demonstrates that they are not. Specifically, the core operations of DM, namely Impoverishment, Fission, and Fusion, violate the principles of Minimalism, namely the Principle of Full Interpretation and the Inclusiveness Condition. Impoverishment can typically be eliminated from analyses with no excessive loss of either parsimony or elegance. Fission and Fusion, however, are less difficult to jettison. While these two operations can be left out, the resulting analysis is clumsy and inadequate, and one can therefore conclude that these are essential operations. This leads one to the following question: if Minimalism cannot constrain DM (given that they are incompatible), what can constrain DM? I present ongoing research into the answer to this question.