Locality domains and morphological rules: Phases, heads, node-sprouting and suppletion in Korean honorification

The Distributed Morphology (DM) model of the morphology-syntax interface has posited several distinct constructs to account for the idiosyncratic character of morphological phenomena. An important strand of research has addressed the interaction of these constructs. One leading idea is that locality restrictions derived from syntactic structure play an important role in constraining rule application (Arad 2003, 2005; Bobaljik 2012; Embick 2003, 2010; Marantz 2013; Merchant 2015; Moskal 2014, 2015a, 2015b; a.o.). For each morphological operation, it is important to establish what its locality domain is and the point in the derivation at which it applies. Using the empirical domain of Korean subject honorification and negation as our lens, we elucidate the nature of two such operations: dissociated morpheme insertion (re-christened ‘node-sprouting’) and morphologically conditioned vocabulary insertion. We argue that node-sprouting rules apply locally once per phase, as an early step after SpellOut. To derive the realization of suppletive Korean verbs, we show it is necessary to allow conditioning by hierarchically and linearly nonlocal nodes within a complex X0 head, contra, e.g., Embick 2010, Merchant 2015, Moskal 2014, 2015a, 2015b, Svenonius 2014. Of extant proposals, Korean honorific and negative suppletion is only consistent with the X0 conditioning domain restriction posited in Bobaljik (2012). However, hierarchical locality is nonetheless relevant for vocabulary insertion, because we demonstrate that if two vocabulary items with equivalently complex conditioning specifications compete with each other, the item with the more local conditioning context wins. En route, we draw several conclusions regarding Korean subject honorification. We argue that verbal subject honorification is syntactically governed grammatical agreement with the honorified NP, with Ahn (2002), Ahn and Yoon (1989), Chung (2009), Koopman (2005), Yun (1993), among others. Although the pattern is syntactically governed, we argue that it is morphologically implemented, rather than adopting the purely syntactic approaches of previous studies. This is motivated by the fact that subject honorification can be realized both low and high in the syntactic structure. We show that most counterexamples to an agreement approach—sentences in which verbal subject honorification appears in the absence of an honorific subject NP—can be explained by the availability within Korean of the syntactic process of possessor-raising to subject position, which we argue applies ‘covertly’ in these cases.1 We also provide arguments that Korean suppletive verbs are truly suppletive, rather than distinct semantically related lexical items, contra Bobaljik (2012) and Moskal (2015b). In the remainder of this section we briefly introduce the mechanisms of interest, namely nodesprouting (aka dissociated morpheme insertion) and vocabulary item competition (aka morphologically conditioned allomorphy), and review previous proposals concerning locality domains for vocabulary item conditioning. In section 2, we then turn to regular Korean subject honorification, first arguing that it should be treated as syntactically conditioned but morphologically implemented agreement. In section 3, with our structural proposal in place, we consider suppletive exponence of honorification and short-form negation, showing that the structural locality of the conditioning feature determines the choice of suppletive exponent, and arguing against both linear and structural adjacency constraints on suppletive conditioning. In section 4, we show that the within-X0 locality constraint on suppletion correctly predicts