Linguistics Colloquium Speaker: Paula Fenger

The Department of Linguistics proudly presents Paula Fenger, Postdoctoral Researcher at Leipzig University.  Dr. Fenger will speak on "Words (a)cross domains: Syntactic and phonological domain effects in Japanese and Sinhala".

In this talk I consider the relationship between syntactic and phonological domains. Specifically, I focus on cases where different phonological operations pick out different sized word-domains. I take as the starting point phonological mismatches in the verbal domain in Japanese and Sinhala and explore whether these mismatches stem from the phonology or the syntax. In the first part of the talk I argue, on the basis of in-depth syntactic and phonological wordhood tests, that word-building can be timed at different stages of the derivation, where earlier processes can be sensitive to syntactic domains (phases) and that later word-formation processes can mask the output of the syntax. In the second part of the talk I consider some implications of this approach, in particular the idea that all such phonological mismatches stem from differences in the underlying syntactic domains. I show that there are correlations between the domains that are picked out word-internally with the domains that are picked out by various syntactic phenomena, which is only expected if word-internal domains are inherited from the syntax.