EXTRA: Phoevos Panagiotidis (University of Cyprus)

Beyond categorisers?

Marantz (1996; 1997; et seq.) introduced a view of lexical categories according to which so-called lexical nouns, verbs, and adjectives result  from acategorial roots being categorised in grammar by categorising heads n, v, and a.

Since then, research has only turned up modest results regarding the exponents of such categorising heads. Surely a number of forms that nominalise, verbalise, and adjectivise are known to exist in a number of languages (e.g. -ise in English), but very few of them can be argued to be exclusive exponents of the purported categorising heads, as they typically also encode properties such as causation (as in -ise).

Some of these modest results include research reported in Spyropoulos et al. (2015) and Panagiotidis et al.  (2017), who actually identify exponents of pure verbalising function in Modern Greek, i.e. forms that only verbalise what they are attached on without also encoding causation, Aktionsart, transitivity etc. Their argument is thus that these forms look exactly like the expected exponents of a v head.

In this talk, we are going to closely examine the evidence provided by Spyropoulos et al. (2015) and Panagiotidis et al.  (2017), and we are going to discuss potentially unsettling empirical facts about the verbalising forms in Modern Greek. In order to accommodate or explain away these facts, we are going to discuss whether there are better alternatives to categorising heads, as well as whether these alternatives can also capture the categorisation process in grammar.

Works cited

Marantz, Alec. 1996, December. “Cat” as a phrasal idiom: Consequences of late insertion in Distributed Morphology. unpublished ms., MIT.

Marantz, Alec. 1997. No escape from syntax: don’t try morphological analysis in the privacy of your own lexicon. U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 4. 201–225.

Panagiotidis, Phoevos & Spyropoulos, Vassilios & Revithiadou, Anthi. 2017. Little v as a categorizing verbal head: Evidence from Greek. In D’Alessandro, Roberta & Franco, Ivana & Gallego, Ángel (eds.), The Verbal Domain, 29–48. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

Spyropoulos, Vassilios & Revithiadou, Anthi & Panagiotidis, Phoevos. 2015. Verbalizers leave marks: evidence from Greek. Morphology 25(3). 299–325. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-015-9260-5