Empty morphs are stable units of form that occur without any associated meaning or function, the inverse of zero morphs. Some empty morphs seem to occur for phonological, rather than morphological, reasons. In Ndebele, for example, subminimal words can be augmented either by prefixing yi- or suffixing -na (Sibanda 2004: 113)—the former is plausibly a least-marked epenthetic syllable, but the latter seems to be a fixed string (a morph) without any associated content. Such patterns pose a puzzle for a theory like Distributed Morphology, just as in the more widely discussed case of (apparently) phonologically optimizing suppletive allomorphy: if phonology derivationally follows morphology, as it does in standard DM, morphological realization should not be constrained by phonological wellformedness. The puzzle posed by empty morphs is deeper, however, precisely because their emptiness means that there is no obvious morphosyntactic element for them to realize. This aspect of the puzzle is sharpened further in languages where the empty morph seems to be borrowed or repurposed from a morphologically contentful use elsewhere; in both Romanian and Armenian, for example, in certain contexts plural morphology occurs in non-plural contexts, apparently to provide an extra syllable in words with monosyllabic roots (Steriade 2022 on Romanian; Arregi, Myler, & Vaux 2013 on Armenian). Here the question is not merely what the empty morph is realizing, but how the morph can be inserted in the absence of morphosyntactic features that usually condition its occurrence. This talk explores the range of options for analyzing both ordinary empty morphs and morphs that are empty only in repurposed contexts, focusing in particular how a purely realizational theory like DM could be modified to account for these patterns.

Conference Room, Campbell Hall 2122A/B

Zoom Link: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/92183308552