The analysis of suspended affixation: coordination, morphosyntax and the architecture of the language faculty

在像土耳其语这样的语言中，单词似乎必须由各种语素组成，这些语素表示语法信息，如时态或一致性。当这些屈折词协调时，其中一些词不需要显示这些语素，而不会影响其解释。我们把这种现象称为“悬置词缀”（或SA）。SA提出了一些普遍的问题：哪些语素可以悬置？我们该如何解释语素的暂停能力呢？SA对人类语言能力有什么影响？这个项目从极简生成语法的角度来解决这些问题（参见乔姆斯基1995），其中研究了与语言相关的心理规则系统或语法。由于在极简主义框架中假设的语法的一般结构，因此可以对SA进行不同的分析，该框架分为处理不同类型信息（句法、语义、音系、形态）的组件。为了解决这个难题，我们需要考虑不同组件的“内部”属性以及这些组件如何交互。这个项目可以阐明语言学理论中的一些基本问题：a)语音形式和意义b)句法结构和单词结构之间的联系。乔姆斯基（1957,1965）的见解是，我们需要一种句法理论，而不是简化为语义学或音韵学等理论。这一观点有两个有争议的延伸。单词和短语结构上的相似之处引发了关于句法结构是否组织了组成单词本身的单位，而将单词作为副现象残留物的争论。更广泛地说，句法结构经常被认为是语义和音系成分的信息，而这些成分是相互看不到的（“倒Y”模型）。通过组织语法的不同组成部分，句法结构对于创造具有语音内容的有意义的短语至关重要。

In languages like Turkish, words seem to be obligatorily composed of various morphemes that signal grammatical information, such as tense or agreement. When these inflected words are coordinated, some of them need not display these morphemes without an impact on their interpretation. Let's call this phenomenon "suspended affixation" (or SA). SA raises some general questions:Which kinds of morphemes can be suspended?How should we explain a morpheme's capacity to be suspended?What implications does SA have for the human language faculty?This project approaches these questions from the perspective of Minimalist generative grammar (see e.g. Chomsky 1995), where the mental rule systems or grammars associated with languages are investigated. Different analyses of SA are possible thanks to the general structure of grammars that is assumed in the Minimalist framework, which is divided into components that deal with different kinds of information (syntactic, semantic, phonological, morphological). To resolve this dilemma we need to consider both the "internal" properties of different components and how these components interact. This project can illuminate some fundamental issues in linguistic theory: the connection between a) phonological form and meaning b) syntactic structure and word structure. The insight from Chomsky (1957, 1965) was that we need a syntactic theory that doesn't reduce to a theory of e.g. semantics or phonology. There are two controversial extensions to this idea. Parallels in the structure of words and phrases have led to debate about whether syntactic structure organizes units that compose words themselves, leaving words as epiphenomenal residue. More broadly syntactic structure is often argued to inform semantic and phonological components, whilst these components are blind to each other (the "Inverted Y" model). By organizing different components of grammar, syntactic structure would then be crucial to creating meaningful phrases with phonological content.