Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-13T03:49:25.135Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Phonologically determined nominal concord as post-syntactic: Evidence from Guébie

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 November 2018

HANNAH SANDE Open the ORCID record for HANNAH SANDE [Opens in a new window]
HANNAH SANDE*
Affiliation:
Georgetown University
*
Author’s address:Georgetown University, 1421 37th Street NW, Poulton Hall 240, Washington, DC 20057-1051hannah.sande@georgetown.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper brings novel data to bear on whether nominal concord relationships are formed in the narrow syntax or post-syntactically. In Guébie, a Kru language spoken in Côte d’Ivoire, nominal concord marking on non-human pronouns and adjectives is determined not by syntactic or semantic features of the concord-triggering noun, but by the phonological form of the noun. Specifically, concord marking on pronouns and adjectives surfaces as a vowel with the same backness features as the vowels of the head noun. Assuming that syntax is phonology-free (Pullum & Zwicky 1986, 1988), the fact that we see phonological features conditioning nominal concord in Guébie means that nominal concord must take place in the post-syntax. I expand on post-syntactic models of nominal concord in Distributed Morphology (Kramer 2010, Norris 2014, Baier 2015) showing that when combined with a constraint-based phonology, such an approach can account for both phonologically and syntactico-semantically determined concord systems. Additionally, the proposed analysis includes a formal account of ellipsis via constraints during the phonological component.

Keywords

GuébieKrunominal concordphonologysyntax
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 55 , Issue 4 , 01 November 2019 , pp. 831 - 878
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Thanks to the Guébie community, and especially to linguistic consultants Sylvain Bodji, Ines Laure Gnahore, Gnakouri Azie, Armand and Olivier Agodio, and Serikpa Emil. Also thanks to Peter Jenks, Larry Hyman, Sharon Inkelas, Darya Kavitskaya, Johanna Nichols, three anonymous reviewers, and audiences at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, Georgetown University, the LSA 2015 annual meeting, and WCCFL 33 for comments on various versions of this work.

Abbreviations used throughout this paper include sg$=$ singular, pl$=$ plural, pfv$=$ perfective, ipfv$=$ imperfective, nom$=$ nominative, acc$=$ accusative, pros$=$ prospective, poss$=$ possessive, emph$=$ emphatic, Part$=$ particle, def$=$ definite, cl$=$ noun class, adj$=$ adjectivizer, inf$=$ infinitive.

References

Aoun, Joseph, Benmamoun, Elabbas & Sportiche, Dominique. 1994. Agreement, word order, and conjunction in some varieties of Arabic. Linguistic Inquiry 25.2, 195–220.Google Scholar
Aoun, Joseph, Benmamoun, Elabbas & Sportiche, Dominique. 1999. Further remarks on first conjunct agreement. Linguistic Inquiry 30.4, 669–681.Google Scholar
Aronoff, Mark. 1992. Noun classes in Arapesh. Yearbook of morphology 1991, 21–32. Dordrecht: Springer.Google Scholar
Baier, Nicholas. 2015. Adjective agreement in Noon: Evidence for a split theory of noun-modifier concord. LSA annual meeting extended abstracts, 1–3.Google Scholar
Baker, Mark C. 2008. The syntax of agreement and concord, vol. 115. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Benmamoun, Elabbas, Bhatia, Archna & Polinsky, Maria. 2009. Closest conjunct agreement in head final languages. In van Craenenbroeck, Jeroen (ed.), Linguistic variaition yearbook 2009, vol. 9.1, 67–88.Google Scholar
Bennett, Ryan, Elfner, Emily & McCloskey, James. 2015. Prosody, focus, and ellipsis in Irish. Ms., Yale, University of British Columbia, and University of California, Santa Cruz.Google Scholar
Benua, Laura. 1997. Transderivational identity. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.Google Scholar
Bermúdez-Otero, Ricardo. 1999. Constraint interaction in language change: Quantity in English and Germanic. University of Manchester.Google Scholar
Bhatt, Rajesh & Walkow, Martin. 2013. Locating agreement in grammar: An argument from agreement in conjunctions. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 31.4, 951–1013.Google Scholar
Bing, Janet. 1987. Phonologically conditioned agreement: Evidence from Krahn. Current approaches to African linguistics, vol. 4, 53–60.Google Scholar
Bobaljik, Jonathan David. 2000. The ins and outs of contextual allomorphy. University of Maryland Working Papers in Linguistics vol. 10, 35–71.Google Scholar
Bošković, Željko. 2009. Unifying first and last conjunct agreement. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 27.3, 455–496. Dordrecht: Springer.Google Scholar
Burzio, Luigi. 1994. Principles of English stress, vol. 72. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Carstens, Vicki. 2001. Multiple agreement and case deletion: Against $\unicode[STIX]{x1D711}$ -incompleteness. Syntax 4.3, 147–163.Google Scholar
Carstens, Vicki. 2011. Hyperactivity and hyperagreement in Bantu. Lingua 121.5, 721–741.Google Scholar
Carstens, Vicki & Diercks, Michael. 2013. Agreeing how? Implications for theories of agreement and locality. Linguistic Inquiry 44.2, 179–237.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 1993. A minimalist program for linguistic theory. In Hale & Keyser(eds.), 1–52.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 2000. Minimalist inquiries: The framework. In Martin, Roger, Michaels, David & Uriagereka, Juan (eds.), Step by step: Essays on minimalist syntax in honor of howard lasnik, 89–155. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam & Halle, Morris. 1968. The Sound Pattern of English. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Cinque, Guglielmo. 2005. Deriving Greenberg’s universal 20 and its exceptions. Linguistic Inquiry 36.3, 315–332.Google Scholar
Cinque, Guglielmo. 2014. Extraction from DP in Italian revisited. In Aboh, Enoch, Guasti, Maria Teresa & Roberts, Ian (eds.), Locality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Collins, Chris. 2004. The agreement parameter. In Breitbarth, Anne & van Riemsdijk, Henk C. (eds.), Triggers, vol. 75, 115–136. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Corbett, Greville. 1991. Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Culbertson, Jennifer, Gagliardi, Annie & Smith, Kenny. 2017. Competition between phonological and semantic cues in noun class learning. Journal of Memory and Language 92, 343–358.Google Scholar
Danon, Gabi. 2011. Agreement and DP-internal feature distribution. Syntax 14.4, 297–317.Google Scholar
Dawson, Keith. 1975. L’accord vocalique en tépo. Annales de l’université d’abidjan, série h: Linguistique. 8.1, 15–26.Google Scholar
Dimitriadis, Alexis. 1997. Alliterative concord in phonology-free syntax. GLOW workshop on the morpho-syntax and phonology of African and Afro-Asiatic languages. Rabat, Morocco.Google Scholar
Dobrin, Lise M. 1995. Theoretical consequences of literal alliterative concord. 31st Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, vol. 1, 127–142.Google Scholar
Egner, Inge. 1989. Precis de grammaire Wobe. Abidjan: Université Nationale de Côte d’Ivoire.Google Scholar
Elbourne, Paul. 2001. E-type anaphora as NP-deletion. Natural Language Semantics 9.3, 241–288.Google Scholar
Embick, David. 2010. Localism versus globalism in morphology and phonology, vol. 60. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Embick, David & Noyer, Rolf. 2001. Movement operations after syntax. Linguistic Inquiry 32.4, 555–595.Google Scholar
Gagliardi, Annie & Lidz, Jeffrey. 2014. Statistical insensitivity in the acquisition of Tsez noun classes. Language 90.1, 58–89.Google Scholar
Gnahore Inés, Laure. 2006. La système verbal de Gabogbo. Université Felix Humphouet Boigny, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire.Google Scholar
Gold, Jana Willer, Boban Arsenijević, Mia Batinić, Michael Becker, Nermina Čordalija, Marijana Kresić, Nedžad Leko, Franc Lanko Marušič, Tanja Milićev, Nataša Milićević and others 2018. When linearity prevails over hierarchy in syntax. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115.3, 495–500.Google Scholar
Gribanova, Vera & Harizanov, Boris. 2015. Locality and directionality in inward-sensitive allomorphy: Russian and Bulgarian. The Morphosyntax-Phonology Connection.Google Scholar
Hale, Kenneth & Keyser, Samuel J. (eds.). 1993. The view from building 20. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Halle, Morris. 1990. An approach to morphology. Proceedings of NELS, vol. 20, 150–184.Google Scholar
Halle, Morris & Marantz, Alec. 1993. Distributed Morphology and the pieces of inflection. In Hale & Keyser (eds.), 111–176.Google Scholar
Halle, Morris & Marantz, Alec. 1994. Some key features of Distributed Morphology. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 21.275, 88.Google Scholar
Hansson Gunnar, Ólafur. 2001. Theoretical and typological issues in consonant harmony. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.Google Scholar
Harbour, Daniel. 2003. The Kiowa case for feature insertion. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 21.3, 543–578.Google Scholar
Harley, Heidi & Noyer, Rolf. 1999. Distributed morphology. Glot International 4.4, 3–9.Google Scholar
Hulsey, Sarah & Sauerland, Uli. 2006. Sorting out relative clauses. Natural Language Semantics 14.2, 111.Google Scholar
Innes, Gordon. 1966. An introduction to Grebo. London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.Google Scholar
Jenks, Peter & Rose, Sharon. 2015. Mobile object markers in Moro: The role of tone. Language 91.2, 269–307.Google Scholar
Kager, René, van der Hulst, Harry & Zonneveld, Wim. 1999. The prosody-morphology interface, vol. 79. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kastner, Itamar. 2016. Form and meaning in the Hebrew verb. Ph.D. dissertation, New York University.Google Scholar
Kastner, Itamar & Linzen, Tal. 2017. A morphosyntactic inductive bias in artificial language learning. NELS 48.Google Scholar
Kaye, Jonathan D. 1981. La sélection des formes pronominales en vata. Revue québecoise de linguistique 11, 117–135.Google Scholar
Kiparsky, Paul. 2000. Opacity and cyclicity. The Linguistic Review 17, 351–367.Google Scholar
Kiparsky, Paul. 2008. Fenno–Swedish quantity: Contrast in Stratal OT. In Vaux, Bert & Nevins, Andrew (eds.), Rules, constraints, and phonological phenomena. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Koopman, Hilda. 1984. The syntax of verbs. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Foris Publications.Google Scholar
Koopman, Hilda. 2006. Agreement configurations. In Boeckx, Cedric (ed.), Agreement systems, 159–200. John Benjamins.Google Scholar
van Koppen, Marjo. 2005. One probe - two goals: Aspects of agreement in Dutch dialects. Ph.D. dissertation, LOT.Google Scholar
Kramer, Ruth. 2009. Definite markers, phi-features, and agreement: A morphosyntactic investigation of the Amharic DP. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California Santa Cruz.Google Scholar
Kramer, Ruth. 2010. The Amharic definite marker and the syntax–morphology interface. Syntax 13.3, 196–240.Google Scholar
Kurisu, Kazutaka. 2001. The phonology of morpheme realization. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California Santa Cruz.Google Scholar
Lasnik, Howard. 2007. On ellipsis: The PF approach to missing constituents. University of Maryland Working Papers in Linguistics 15, 143–153.Google Scholar
Márchese, Lynell. 1979. Atlas linguistique Kru. Abidjan: ILA.Google Scholar
Márchese, Lynell. 1986a. The pronominal system in Godié. In Wiesemann, U. (ed.), Pronominal systems, 217–255. Tubingen: GNV.Google Scholar
Márchese, Lynell. 1986b. Tense, aspect and the development of auxiliaries in the Kru languages family. Summer Institute of Linguistics (UCLA).Google Scholar
Márchese, Lynell. 1988. Noun classes and agreement systems in Kru: A historical approach. In Barlow & Ferguson(eds.), Agreement in natural language: Approach, theories and descriptions. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Marusic, Franc, Nevins, Andrew & Badecker, Bill. 2015. The grammars of conjunction agreement in Slovenian. Syntax 18.1, 39–77.Google Scholar
Marvin, Tatjana. 2002. Topics in the stress and syntax of words. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT.Google Scholar
McCarthy, John. 2005. Optimal paradigms. In Downing, Laura, Hall, Tracy Alan & Raffelsiefen, Renate (eds.), Paradigms in phonological theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
McCarthy, John & Prince, Alan. 1995. Faithfulness and reduplicative identity. In Beckman, Jill, Dickey, Laura & Urbanczyk, Suzanne (eds.), University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics 18: Papers in Optimality Theory, 249–384. Amherst, MA: GLSA.Google Scholar
McCarthy, John J. 2000. Harmonic serialism and parallelism. In Hirotani, Masako (ed.), Proceedings of the North East Linguistics Society (NELS 30), 501–524. Amherst, MA: GLSA.Google Scholar
McCarthy, John J. & Prince, Alan. 1993. Generalized alignment. Yearbook of morphology 1993, 79–153. Dordrecht: Springer.Google Scholar
Meeussen, Achille E. 1967. Bantu grammatical reconstructions. Africana Linguistica 3, 79–121.Google Scholar
Merchant, Jason. 2001. The syntax of silence: Sluicing, islands, and the theory of ellipsis. Oxford University Press on Demand.Google Scholar
Merchant, Jason. 2008. Variable island repair under ellipsis. Topics in Ellipsis 1174, 132–153.Google Scholar
Merchant, Jason. 2015. Ellipsis: A survey of analytical approaches. University of Chicago. Handbook of ellipsis. Oxford University Press: Oxford.Google Scholar
Munn, Alan. 1999. First conjunct agreement: Against a clausal analysis. Linguistic Inquiry 30.4, 643–668.Google Scholar
Nekitel, Otto. 1986. A sketch of nominal concord in Abu’ (an Arapesh language). New Guinea Linguistics 249 (Pacific Linguistics A70).Google Scholar
Norris, Mark. 2014. A theory of nominal concord. Ph.D. dissertation, UC Santa Cruz.Google Scholar
Noyer, Rolf. 1997. Features, positions and affixes in autonomous morphological structure. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Oltra Massuet, Maria Isabel. 1999. On the notion of theme vowel: A new approach to Catalan verbal morphology. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT.Google Scholar
Preminger, Omer. 2009. Breaking agreements: Distinguishing agreement and clitic doubling by their failures. Linguistic Inquiry 40.4, 619–666.Google Scholar
Preminger, Omer. 2011. Agreement as a fallible operation. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT.Google Scholar
Pullum, Geoffrey & Zwicky, Arnold. 1988. The syntax-phonology interface. In Newmeyer (ed.), Linguistics: The Cambridge survey, 255–280. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Pullum, Geoffrey K. & Zwicky, Arnold M.. 1986. Phonological resolution of syntactic feature conflict. Language 751–773.Google Scholar
Richards, Marc. 2015. Defective agree, case alternations, and the prominence of person. In Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, Ina, Malchukov, Andrej L. & Richards, Marc D. (eds.), Scales and hierarchies. A cross-disciplinary perspective, 173–196. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Rose, Sharon. 1997. Theoretical issues in comparative Ethio–Semitic phonology and morphology. Ph.D. dissertation, McGill University.Google Scholar
Rose, Sharon & Walker, Rachel. 2004. A typology of consonant agreement as correspondence. Language 80, 475–531.Google Scholar
Samek-Lodovici, Vieri. 1993. A unified analysis of crosslinguistic morphological gemination. Proceedings of ConSOLE 1, 23.Google Scholar
Sande, Hannah. 2014. Pronoun-antecedent phonological agreement in Guébie. UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report.Google Scholar
Sande, Hannah. 2016. An interface model of phonologically determined agreement. 33rd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 339–350.Google Scholar
Sande, Hannah. 2017. Distributing morphologically conditioned phonology. Ph.D. dissertation, UC Berkeley.Google Scholar
Sande, Hannah. 2018. Cross-word morphologically conditioned scalar tone shift in Guébie. Morphology 28.3, 253–295.Google Scholar
Sande, Hannah & Jenks, Peter. To appear. Cophonologies by Phase. NELS 48 Proceedings.Google Scholar
Sauvageot, Serge. 1967. Note sur la classification nominale en bainouk. Paris: Ed. du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.Google Scholar
Sauvageot, Serge. 1987. La linguistique en tant que témoignage historique: Le cas du baynunk. Contributions à l’histoire du Sénégal 17–22.Google Scholar
Schadeberg, Thilo C. 1992. Sketch of Swahili morphology, vol. 2. Köln: Köppe.Google Scholar
Sigurdsson, Halldór Ármann. 1993. Agreement as head visible feature government. Studia Linguistica 47.1, 32–56.Google Scholar
Sigurdsson, Halldór Ármann. 2004. Agree in syntax, agreement in signs. Working papers in Scandinavian syntax, 74.Google Scholar
Svenonius, Peter. 2004. On the edge. Peripheries, 259–287. Dordrecht: Springer.Google Scholar
Toosarvandani, Maziar & van Urk, Coppe. 2014. The syntax of nominal concord: What ezafe in Zazaki shows us. North East Linguistic Society (NELS 43), 209–220.Google Scholar
Traoré, Yranahan & Féry, Caroline. 2017. Consonant harmony in Fròʔò nominal domain. Presentation at the 25th Manchester Phonology Meeting.Google Scholar
Van de Velde, Mark & Idiatov, Dmitry. 2017. Morphological classes and gender in Bena-Yungur. In Kaji, Shigeki (ed.), 8th World Congress of African Linguistics, 53–65. Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa: Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.Google Scholar
Van der Wal, Jenneke. 2015. Object clitics in comparative Bantu syntax. BLS 41.Google Scholar
Walker, Rachel. 2000. Nasalization, neutralization, and opacity effects. PhD thesis, University of California, Santa Cruz. Published from Garland Press dissertation.Google Scholar
Willer-Gold, Jana Boban Arsenijević, Mia Batinić, Nermina Čordalija, Marijana Kresić, Nedžad Leko, Franc Lanko Marušič, Tanja Milićev, Nataša Milićević, Ivana Mitić et al. 2016. Conjunct agreement and gender in South Slavic: From theory to experiments to theory. Journal of Slavic Linguistics 24.1, 187–224.Google Scholar
Winchester, Lindley. 2016. Morphosyntactic features and contextual allomorphy: Evidence from Modern Standard Arabic. NELS 47.Google Scholar
Zogbo Lynell, Marchese. 2012. Kru revisited, Kru revised. Towards Proto-Niger-Congo: Comparison and reconstruction.Google Scholar
Zogbo Lynell, Marchese. 2017. Les vestiges des classes nominales dans les langues Kru: Accord et suffixes. Typologie et documentation des langues en Afrique de l’Ouest: Les actes du 27e Congrès de la Société de Linguistique de l’Afrique de l’Ouest (SLAO 159).Google Scholar