Constraints on Linearization in Nominal Modification

这是一个众所周知的观察，在许多语言中，前名修饰语，如带有定语的形容词，不允许在它们和它们的主名词之间有其他材料。因此，“the afraid of the doctor patient”在英语中是完全不符合语法的。学者们利用这一事实引入了所谓的头部-最终过滤器（HFF），该过滤器禁止前置修饰语中的后头部材料。同时，这种约束既太强又太弱。首先，有些语言，如希腊语或俄语，实际上允许违反HFF的A-XP-N顺序，这意味着HFF会过度生成。其次，有些语言，如巴斯克语，在后名修饰语属于HFF的应用范围之外，受到类似的限制，要求它们是头首字母，不允许镜像的N-XP-A顺序。在这方面，HFF表现不佳。根据我们自己早期的研究（Alexeyenko & Zeijlstra 2021），我们假设这些高频效应的基础是定语头部的形态状态和形容词在其谓语形式中显示的特征之间的相互作用。只有当谓语形容词没有表现出DP中活跃的所有特征，并且属性标记本质上是词缀时，才会出现高频效应。虽然这种概括已经适用于一组有限的语言，但这个假设还不能完全得到证实。为此，需要进行大规模的跨语言调查，以代表所有相关语系的语言样本，同时也需要进行理论分析，解释为什么这种概括成立。这正是我们在这个项目中要做的。我们将研究这种概括在多大程度上成立，或者是否需要改进，我们将解释为什么定语语素的形态状态和形容词上活跃的特征之间的接口在许可特定的线性化模式中起着如此重要的作用。这些研究的结果不仅会更好地理解复杂的名义表达可以线性化的方式，而且还会在形态和句法操作之间的关系以及它们背后的特征方面产生新的见解。

It is a well-known observation that, in many languages, prenominal modifiers, such as attributively used adjectives, do not allow other material between them and their head nouns. Thus, 'the afraid of the doctor patient' is fully ungrammatical in English. Scholars have taken this fact to introduce the so-called Head-Final Filter (HFF) that bars post-head material in prenominal modifiers. At the same time, this constraint is both too strong and too weak. First, there are languages, like Greek or Russian, in which the HFF-violating A-XP-N order is in fact allowed, which means that the HFF overgenerates. Second, there are languages, like Basque, where postnominal modifiers, which fall outside the domain of the application of the HFF, are subject to an analogous restriction that requires them to be head-initial and disallows the mirrored N-XP-A order. In this respect, the HFF undergenerates.Basing ourselves on earlier work (Alexeyenko & Zeijlstra 2021), we hypothesize that what underlies these HFF-effects is an interaction between the morphological status of attributive heads and the features that adjectives display in their predicative forms. Only if predicative adjectives do not display all the features that are active in the DP and if the attributive marker is affixal in nature, HFF-effects emerge.While such a generalization already holds for a limited set of languages, this hypothesis cannot be fully confirmed yet. For that, a large-scale cross-linguistic survey with a language sample representing all relevant language families is needed, as is a theoretical analysis that explains why such a generalization holds. This is exactly what we will carry out in this project. We will investigate to what extent this generalization holds or whether it is in need of refinement and we will provide an explanation of why the interface between the morphological status of attributive morphemes and the features that are active on adjectives plays such a major role in licensing particular linearization patterns.The outcomes of these investigations will not only yield a better understanding of the way that complex nominal expressions can be linearized, but also create new insights with respect to the relation between morphological and syntactic operations and the features that underlie them.