The Mirror Principle and the order of verbal extensions: evidence from Pular

As an empirical generalization, the Mirror Principle (MP, Baker, 1985) says that there is a close parallelism between morphology and syntax, but it does not specify according to which general principles are affixes merged into syntactic structure. Following Cinque (1999, 2006), I assume that affixes are merged in a fine-grained hierarchy of functional projections to check the corresponding features. In particular, I will claim that argument structure changing affixes in Pular are merged in a fixed hierarchy of theta-related functional heads and that the complements they introduce are merged in the specifiers of these functional projections. As evidence, I will show that verbal affixes in Pular occur in a fixed order which is not based on semantic scope and that the order of the affixes matches the underlying order of their complements. 0. Introduction: two approaches to morphology The traditional view on morphology is that word-formation takes place in the lexicon, and that morphological rules are different in nature and operate on different primitive elements than syntactic rules: morphology operates on stems and morphemes to produce words, while syntax operates on words to produce phrases and sentences. This view has been formalized as the lexical integrity principle (LI), which makes sure that syntactic rules cannot operate on word parts, so that, for instance, affixes cannot be detached from a word by syntactic rules. An alternative approach has been initiated by the seminal work of Baker (1988): syntax operates on both words and morphemes, and a complex word can be formed by syntactic rules, and more specifically head movement, through incorporation of a lexical root to a morpheme. This approach can account for generalizations that cover both morphological and syntactic elements, the best known one being the mirror principle (MP, Baker (1985)), which states that morphological derivation reflects syntactic derivation (and viceversa). If the morphological structure of a complex word is derived through head-movement of the lexical root to the heads where the morphemes are base-generated, the MP follows straightforwardly: “the order of morphemes in a complex word reflects the natural syntactic embedding of the heads that correspond to those morphemes” (Baker (2002, 326)). Notice that this approach also captures LI effects, since the result of the incorporation process is still a word-level (i.e a X°) category. This sets the incorporation model apart from other syntactic + Thanks are due to Guglielmo Cinque, the supervisor of my thesis, Damonte (2004), on which this work is based. Heartfelt thanks also to my long-suffering informant, Rabiatou Diallo, who provided judgments on all the examples in this paper and many more. As usual, all mistakes are my own responsibility. 1 Cfr. Di Sciullo and Williams (1987) and Bresnan and Mchombo (1995), among many others. 2 Note that this only holds if incorporation is an adjunction process and adjunction is only to the left of the category being adjoined to. In the antisymmetric framework of Kayne (1994), adopted here, no such assumption is necessary, as right-adjunction is impossible.