A Rough Sketch for Defining Affix(ation)

Have I kept you waiting?

I note some point to analyze affixes in sophisticated morphosyntactic theory.

Affixes and Affixations

First, we should distinguish between the operation "Affixation" and the morphological class "Affix" clearly in order to realize problems of affix accurately because it seems that not all affixes undergo some sort of affixation.
Briefly speaking, it is not necessarily the case that every affix is derived directly by the morphological (or phonological) operation.

A tentative definition of "Affix"

It is obvious that the class "affix" cannot be defined phonologically or semantically, namely neither phonological littleness nor every semantic character is sufficient to condition being an affix. As for phonological conditions, we easily come up with a pair of an affix and a word which have the same phonological volume and, similarly, many languages have a pair of an affix and a word which have the (almost) same meaning.
Consequently, I temporarily define the class "Affix" as follows,

(1) A tentative definition of "Affix"
A set of morphemes which can exist only in the local domain of other morphemes.

Affixes without affixations

According to the above definition, we can assume that there are affixes which do not undergo an affixation. Furthermore, they can be divided into two groups, a) bound morphemes which are externally merged directly in the local domain of other morphemes, and b) bound morphemes which are moved into the local domain of other morphemes at the stage of the narrow syntax.
In the latter case, the movement might be head movement. If so, we may get a story for explaining a relationship between head movement and affixation (see the previous article on head movement).

Affixes through affixations

In terms of affixations as morphological or phonological operations, we already have some important works. For instance, see Embick and Noyer (2001) on an affixation as a morphological operation or a phonological (post-morphological) operation and Embick(2007) especially on some sorts of phonological one.

What kinds of local domains do relate?

Embick and Noyer (2001) also defines two types of local domains which must be valuable to analyze affixes in the field of formal morphosyntactic theory: "M-Word" and "S-Word", which were considered for more detail in Embick (2007).

Summary

There are possible sorts of affixes as follows.

(2)Affixes (, which must be in the local domain of other morphemes.)
a. not undergo affixations
--1. externally merged
--2. head-moved
b. undergo affixations
--1. by a morphological operation: morphological merger
--2. by a phonological (post-morphological) operation: local dislocation

Moreover, the local dislocation have some subclassifications. See Embick (2007).

References

• Embick, David and Rolf Noyer(2001) “Movement operations after syntax,” Linguistic Inquiry 32: 555-595.


• Embick, David (To appear) “ Linearization and Local Dislocation: Derivational mechanics and interactions,” Linguistic Analysis.

How should we formalize Head Movement?

Head Movement (henceforth, HM) has been one of the most important notion to analyze not only many "flip" phenomena (e.g. Subject-Aux Inversion in European languages) but also the syntax-morphology relationship since Baker(1988).
However, especially in the Minimalist literature, its theoretical status as a syntactic operation has been doubted since Chomsky(1995) though it is still important for various analyses which include a lot of interface studies.
I will show some points of this issue (This article is still a draft, so I keep enriching the content and collecting related papers).

Theoretical problems of HM (Matushansky(2006))

1. violate structure preservation: HM changes the projection status of the moving head (from minimal to maximal)
2. violate cyclicity: HM does not extend the root of the tree.
   

Differences between HM and phrasal movement(Matushansky(2006))

1. The probe and the target act as one constituent after HM, but not after phrasal movement.


2. Neither the probe nor the target can be extracted after HM: ban on excorporation


3. HM is more local than phrasal movement: Head Movement Constraint（Travis(1984), Baker(1988)）


4. HM feeds affixation; phrasal movement does not.


5. HM seems to have no semantic or syntactic effects, but phrasal movement does.

Some positions

1. HM as phonological or PF-related movement: Chomsky(1995), Hale and Keyser(2002), Harley (2002, 2003)
2. HM is syntactic, but it can be reduced to other syntactic movement: Koopman(2005), Matushansky(2006)
3. HM is NOT phonological but syntactic: Lechner(2005), Fitzpatrick(2006)
   

HM bibliography

• Baker, Mark C.(1988) Incorporation: A Theory of Grammatical Function Changing. The University of Chicago Press.


• Chomsky, Noam(1995) The Minimalist Program. MIT Press.


• Fitzpatrick, Jastin M.(2006) "Deletion Through Movement," Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 24: 399-431.


• Hale, Ken and Samuel Jay Keyser(2002) Prolegomenon to a Theory of Argument Structure. MIT Press.


• Harley, Heidi(2002) “Why one head is better than two: Head movement and compounding as consequences of Merge in Bare Phrase Structure,” A paper presented in the Arizona Linguistics Colloquium Series.


• Harley, Heidi(2003) “Merge, Conflation, and Head Movement: The First Sister Principle Revisited,” NELS 34 Proceedings, 239-254.


• Koopman, Hilda(2005) “Korean (and Japanese) Morphology from a Syntactic Perspective,” Linguistic Inquiry 36(4): pp.601-633.


• Lechner, Winfried(2005) “Semantic Effects of Head Movement,” ms.


• Matushansky, Ora(2006) “Head movement in Linguistic Theory,” Linguistic Inquiry. 37(1): pp.69-109.


• Travis, Lisa(1984) Parameters and Effects of Word Order Variation. Ph.D.Dissertation, MIT.