Filosofía del Lenguaje (1st semester, 2020, in Spanish)
Eleonora Orlando
Problemas Especiales de Filosofía del Lenguaje (1st semester, 2018, in Spanish)
Eleonora Orlando
Dimensiones del significado (2nd semester, 2017, in Spanish)
Andrés Saab
Desacuerdos racionales: problemas de semántica y epistemología (2nd semester, 2017, in Spanish)
Ramiro Caso & Nicolás Lo Guercio
Approaching Polymorphy (2nd semester, 2016, in English)
David Embick (University of Pennsylvania)
In these lectures I will examine connections between three phenomena or effects. The first involves the idea that certain competitions for form evidently do not have a unique winner, such that a single structure receives multiple pronunciations: e.g. the nouns cover, coverage, and covering (the last on the non-gerund reading). This "Apparently Non-Unique Competition" is noted in recent works on derivational morphology (e.g. Embick and Marantz 2008, Borer 2013) but has not been analyzed in detail. A second effect is the intuition that speakers have concerning the "incorrect" selection of certain derivational allomorphs, such as confusal rather than confusion (compare e.g. refusal and refusion). Though the effect remains to be made precise, speakers have the intuition that some of the "non-existing" forms are possible outputs of their grammar, whereas e.g. incorrect tense forms like bended instead of bent are not. The third effect involves apparently "long distance" effects in allomorph selection, where it appears that a suffix is sensitive to the identity of a prefix. For example, and assuming following much prior work (e.g. Aronoff 1976) that MIT is a bound Root in English, we find nominals permit, and permission, but not e.g. permittal; whereas with trans- we find transmittal and transmission, but no noun transmit. According to theories that incorporate linear adjacency into allomorph selection (e.g. Embick 2010), such effects are not expected.