Revisiting Revived Syntactic Structures文档.pdf

Revisiting Revived Sy ntactic Structures : The Extended Hybrid Approach to Verbal Morphology AKIRA OMAKI Abstract Lasnik ’s (1995b) hybrid account for English verbal morphology has been shown to be superior to the alternative lexicalist account (Chomsky, 1993), though it has suffered from some conceptual and empirical problems. This paper proposes to extend the hybrid-ness of Lasnik ’s analysis by revising one aspect of his proposal: lexical items can be affixal and featural simultaneously, thereby ensuring that the same category has the same set of formal features. This revision and its extension to modals brings about desirable conceptual and empirical consequences. First, it eliminates the Stranded Affix Filter (SAF) by attributing SAF effects to the timing of feature checking. 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 . Introduction Analyses of verbal morphology have played pivotal roles in syntactic theories since Chomsky (1957), as evident in proposals such as affix hopping (Chomsky, 1957), head movement (Emonds, 1978), split IP (Pollock, 1989) and strong vs. weak feature distinction (Chomsky, 1993. See Lasnik, 2000 for a review of these proposals). Lasnik (1995b) proposed a hybrid approach to English verbal morphology, which essentially blends two opposing positions on how verbal morphology is realized. He adopted the affix hopping analysis (Chomsky, 1957) for lexical Vs (i.e., verbs other than have/be), arguing that lexical Vs are stored in bare form