Syntax Lunch: Akira Omaki
Another look at affixal heads
11 April, 1108B MMH, 12:30pm
Abstract
This talk presents my recent work on English verbal morphology, which
essentially extends the hybridness of Lasnik's (1995b) hybrid approach
to English verbal morphology by revising one aspect of his proposal:
lexical items can be affixal and featural simultaneously, unlike the
traditional assumption that affixal and featural items are in
complementary distribution. This revision brings about desirable
conceptual and empirical consequences. First, it eliminates the Stranded
Affix Filter (SAF). The SAF effects (e.g., stranded ing) are deduced
from strong features and the timing of feature checking (Lasnik, 1995a,
1999). Second, this solves two empirical problems observed for Lasnik's
system, namely, a) in VP ellipses, stranded ing is disallowed due to
the SAF but stranded en is not, and b) it overgenerates a sentence
like It does not be raining. I will also (hopefully) discuss whether
the current approach can be extended to analyses of other functional
categories in English and other languages.