Abstract for Jason Kandybowicz's talk

Syntactic and phono-syntactic edge sensitivity in Nupe
Jason Kandybowicz (Swarthmore)
April 24, 2007 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

Historically, the notion of edge as a grammatically sensitive domain has received strong support from processes and interactions occurring in both the morphological and phonological wings of grammar. Recently, edges have come to play a prominent role in syntactic analysis as well. As with any theoretical innovation or paradigm shift, two crucial issues are raised. First, how principled is the innovation? Second, what advantages does the new way of thinking offer over the old? This talk addresses the second question by way of case studies of two independent phenomena in Nupe, a Benue-Congo language spoken in central Nigeria. We show that reference to edges in both the narrow syntax and at the syntax-phonology interface provides principled explanations to two long-standing unsolved puzzles in the Nupe literature. The argument is thus that a syntactic theory that embraces edges is indeed desirable from an analytical standpoint and thus represents a step forward.
The first case study showcases narrow syntactic edge sensitivity. A puzzle perennially observed in the Nupe literature is that extraction from tensed clauses is possible, but extraction from perfect clauses is not (Smith 1967, Kandybowicz & Baker 2003).
We argue that the existence of edge features (Chomsky 2005) allows for an elegant solution to this empirical problem. At the same time, we show that the problem of Nupe perfect extraction sheds light on the very nature of the edge features that are borne by strong phase heads, i.e. those features responsible for driving cyclic movement to phase edge positions in compliance with the phase impenetrability condition (Chomsky 2001). Contra Chomsky (2005), we argue that edge features are not inherent properties of strong phase heads (as least for the v phase), but are rather derivative properties inherited by way of edge features already present on the lexical verb which are transmitted to the phase head via head movement.
The second case study showcases sensitivity to the edge at the syntax-phonology interface. A-bar movement in Nupe shows clear Comp-trace (C-t) effects.
The puzzle in this case is that a seemingly unrelated range of options exist in the language for averting C-t effects. These options include the following: phonological reduction of C0; existence of TP-adjoined adverbials; resumption of the displaced occurrence; and spelling out tense markers. We show that Nupe C-t effects reduce to a violation of the intonational phrase edge generalization (An 2006), which requires that the mapping from syntax to phonology result in an output in which the edge of every intonational phrase is phonetically marked. The seemingly disparate cases of C-t resolution previously mentioned follow naturally as a consequence.