[SynSem] Ksenia Ershova (University College London)

This talk will challenge the efficacy of standard diagnostics for the presence or absence of syntactic structure based on overt morphological exponence, with a particular focus on West Circassian, a Northwest Caucasian language. I focus on two scenarios where the absence of functional morphology has been taken to correlate with the absence of the corresponding syntactic structure: (i) verbal cross-reference morphology in nominalizations and (ii) case/definiteness marking in DPs. In the first case study, the amount of verbal functional structure that is included in a nominalization is usually diagnosed by the presence or absence of corresponding verbal morphology. In West Circassian, nominalized verbs do not display full cross-reference marking with their arguments, suggesting that the portion of the clausal syntax which is responsible for phi-agreement is absent (e.g. Ershova 2020). I argue that this is an illusion: nominalizations are considerably larger than they appear. The second case study focuses on the correlation between the absence of case marking in nominal arguments and a diminished syntactic structure: nominals which are unmarked for case tend to be indefinite and number neutral, suggesting that they lack the functional structure that is responsible for marking definiteness and number (e.g. Arkadiev and Testelets 2019). Based on joint work with Nikita Bezrukov, I argue that unmarked nominal arguments may be larger than they appear: the absence of overt case exponence does not neatly correlate with the absence of syntactic structure.