The Mirror Alignment Principle: Morpheme Ordering at the Morphosyntax Phonology Interface
Since at least Baker's (1985) proposal of the "Mirror Principle" it has been widely recognized that the linear order of morphemes within a morphologically complex word generally correlates with hierarchical syntactic structure (see also Muysken 1981) In morphologically complex words, morphemes which represent the exponents of morphosyntactic terminals that are lower in the syntactic tree (or, in Baker's terms, earlier in the syntactic derivation) generally surface closer to the root than those morphemes which are exponents of higher morphosyntactic terminals. A question that Baker does not directly explore in his original proposal is by what formal means this ordering relation is implemented in the grammar. Both from a cross linguistic perspective and a language internal perspective, it is generally an arbitrary property (in terms of the synchronic grammar) whether a particular morpheme displays prefixal or suffixal behavior. This makes it difficult if not impossible to directly translate proposals regarding syntactic linearization (e.g. Kayne 1994) into the word level domain. Some other mechanism is needed. This paper proposes such a mechanism: the Mirror Alignment Principle. This paper outlines a proposal whereby the surface order of morphemes is the result of several steps in a modular, feed forward grammar with the following characteristics. The syntax generates a hierarchical structure of morphosyntactic terminals (following generally the principles of Chomsky's (1995, et seq. Minimalist Program) This hierarchal structure serves as input to a discrete morphological component (as in Distributed Morphology (DM) Halle Marantz 1993) which has the ability to perform its own operations on the hierarchical structure (cf. Arregi Nevins 2012) After vocabulary insertion within the morphological component endows the morphosyntactic terminals with phonological content, an Optimality Theoretic (Prince Smolensky 1993/2004) grammar generates surface forms through constraint evaluation. The full grammar is schematized in (1) where " " indicates that the output of the prior module serves as the input to the next module.