Locality in Vowel Harmony

4. Defective Intervention: When Search Comes Back Empty-Handed

4 Defective Intervention: When Search Comes Back Empty-Handed If two vowels go walking, the first does the talking. —Theodore Clymer 4.1 The Grammatical Elements of Minimality We have seen that the Search procedure for vowel harmony can relativize its locality in very limited ways, according to a small parametric space. The establishment of the search domain leads to an extremely myopic principle of copying from the closest element encountered. We now turn to defining and describing the conditions that determine whether an element , once found, can be copied from or not. Elements that cannot be successfully copied from—even though they are included in the search domain—are called blockers, especially when there are more distant elements in the domain that they block from ever being considered. The e¤ect of blockers, seeking a harmonic value with whom fails as soon as they are encountered, is an inviolable principle of locality. Once the search halts with a defective element in its path, no more-distant elements may be considered. Consider the following configuration: A is a needy value-seeker searching for a value-source. The elements x, y, z are in its domain. (1) [ . . . x . . . y . . . z . . . ] A Ordinarily, the search will terminate with z. However, suppose that although z is in the search domain and the closest element to A within that domain, it does not satisfy some additional requirement R. By virtue of not satisfying R, z is defective. What is most interesting about these configurations is that both y and z bear the feature [F] that A needs, but, by failing to meet R, not only is z excluded as a value-source—it also prevents y (which does meet R) from being a value-source as well. The concept of minimality expresses the idea that search cannot look past a defective element to a more distant one. A syntactic example of defective intervention can be schematized with plural agreement in Icelandic. (2) ÞaD finnst mörgum stúdentum tölvurnar ljótar. there find.sg/*pl some student.dat.pl computer.nom.pl ugly ‘Some students find the computers ugly.’ (Holmberg and Hróarsdóttir 2004, 654) In (2), the value-seeker is the Tense node, which needs to value its ffeatures . The closest element in its domain is the dative ‘some students’, which indeed has a [þplural] feature that T could potentially copy. However, there is an additional source condition: the source must be [þnominative]. The dative fails this condition. Not only does T thereby fail to agree with the [þplural] dative, it also fails to agree with the [þplural] nominative, which is the next closest element in the domain. In other words, once the closest DP is found, there is no second chance (Chomsky 2001). When T cannot find a licit value-source in its domain, a last-resort operation supplies a default value for the needed feature(s). The default value for [Gplural] in Icelandic is [
plural]. Default values can be determined within a given language using considerations of morphosyntactic markedness, but to some extent they are language-particular. Compare default agreement in Hindi (3), which is masculine singular, with default agreement in Russian (4), which is neuter singular. (3) Lakshmi-ne Sumita-ko dekhaa. Lakshmi-fem-erg Sumita-fem-objctv saw.pfctv.masc ‘Lakshmi saw Sumita.’ (4) Ivanu nužno vrača. Ivan.masc.dat needs.neut doctor.masc.acc ‘Ivan needs a doctor.’ In (3), neither (feminine) noun phrase can be copied from for agreement, because both are nonnominative. The last-resort gender-value that is inserted in order for Hindi verbal agreement to interface with the morphology is masculine. In (4), when neither of the (masculine) noun phrases can be copied from for agreement because both are nonnominative , the Russian value of last-resort default agreement is neuter. We see, then, that when there is no licit source for feature-copying in syntactic agreement, the default value must be determined on a language-specific 122 Chapter 4 basis. In section 3.3, we saw that Finnish and Uyghur, two languages with contrastive [Gback] harmony and identical inventories, insert di¤erent last-resort values when search fails: [
back] for Finnish and [þback] for Uyghur. In a target-centric theory of locality, once the search domain is delimited , the value-seeker (A in (1)) will always halt the search with the first element (z...