Successive cyclicity at the syntax-morphology interface: Evidence from standard Indonesian and Kendal Javanese

Abstract

This paper proposes a new analysis of the distribution of the active voice morphology in Standard Indonesian and Kendal Javanese. Specifically, I argue that an NP undergoes movement into the edge of v*P to delete the uninterpretable D-feature of the phase head (Chomsky 2000, 2001, 2004). This deletion, in turn, blocks the active voice prefix from being inserted under v* in the post-syntactic morphological component; its null counterpart is inserted as the elsewhere vocabulary item. To the extent that the proposed analysis holds, the data discussed here provides crucial empirical support for the role of vP phases at the syntax-morphology interface and yields a new understanding of "deletion" as the failure of vocabulary insertion (Harley 2005) in the sense of Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993). © The author 2012. © The Editorial Board of Studia Linguistica 2012. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.