Omer Preminger

Here is a paper by Canaan Breiss and Bruce Hayes (I will refer to the paper as B&H). To offer a brief summary of B&H’s main empirical point, it shows that the choice of syntactic ‘structure’ (i.e., both the choice of terminals and their arrangement) is probabilistically biased towards avoiding phonotactically problematic sequences (e.g. a sequence of two consecutive sibilants), even when the sequence in question arises across a word boundary. It does so by focusing on a series of well-established phonological constraints (from work on word‑level phonology), and showing that word‑bigrams whose juncture violates these constraints are underattested. This is shown to be the case in a variety of corpora, both written and spoken. Let’s refer to this as Evidence for Phonologically-Influenced Choice of Syntactic Structure, or EPICSS for short. […]  [read more]

Here’s a nice little thing to ponder. Suppose syntactic computation is bound by some cyclic domains – we can call them “phases” (though I am on record with the opinion that phase theory is a faded facsimile of Subjacency, and many of its more recent developments, a faded facsimile of Barriers). And suppose that we encounter a configuration like (1) in which H is able to access XP but unable to access YP, where XP and YP both seem, as far as we can tell, featurally suited to H’s needs: […]  [read more]