Syntax as an exponent of morphological features

We examine the periphrastic passive construction in Latin, in which a part of the verb paradigm is expressed by an auxiliary/copular verb ‘to be’ with the perfective passive participle, with the syntax of a predicative adjective construction. Building in part on the treatment sketched by Börjars, Vincent and Chapman (1997) and other recent work in Lexical Functional Grammar (Frank and Zaenen, 1998) and related grammatical formalisms, we show that the interpenetration of syntax and morphology exhibited by the Latin data is more difficult to accommodate within these lexicalist theories than is assumed by Börjars et al. (1997). We find empirical support for a distinction between purely formal or morphological features and contentive syntactic features, a distinction which is missing from the standard model of LFG but which is made (under a variety of different architectural assumptions) in some recent LFG work (including Butt, Niño & Segondo, 1996, Frank and Zaenen, 1998, Sadler 1999). In the present case, the distinction is motivated by the existence of deponent verbs, which are ‘passive in form but active in meaning’. The deponents share the periphrastic perfective forms of passive non-deponent verbs, showing that we must separate form from function even for the regular non-deponent verbs. We do not present an LFG analysis as such but rather we give an outline of the kind of morphology component that the theory must accommodate. We adopt the theory of predicates presented by Ackerman and Webelhuth (1998) and within this we provide an analysis based on Stump’s (in press) Paradigm Function Morphology. This appeals to a rule of referral within the morphological paradigm, defined over purely morphological features, realizing the perfective passive features as a syntactic construction.