Post-syntactic Excorporation in Realizational Morphology: Evidence from Breton 1. Post-syntactic Excorporation

* I investigate a Breton paradigm where excorporation takes place from morphological amalgams such as inflected lexical verbs. I propose that Breton analytic structures with auxiliation in 'do' illustrate a case of excorporation outside of syntax, in realizational morphology. The distribution of Breton excorporation is directly dependent on the output of the syntactic module : word order. The trigger for excorporation, Late Expletive Insertion Trigger, is itself at the interface, after syntax and before phonology. Excorporation out of the inflected head asks for repair strategies in order to pass the Stray Affix Filter : 'do' support insertion leads to regular analytic structures in 'do' (to.know do.1SG, 'I know'). Another last resort strategy is to pronounce the lower copy of the lexical verb, which leads to doubling structures (to.know know.1SG, 'I know'). Idiosyncrasy of the latter confirms that repairs of excorporation are not syntactic. Since the 80's, excorporation of syntactic material from within a complex head is ruled out at the level of syntax in terms of a ban on word-internal traces (Baker 1988: 73), or ensured by a Head Opacity Condition which stipulates that the internal structure of X° categories is opaque to move-α (Ouhalla 1988:15). Roberts (1991:212) opposed this view and noted that banning excorporation from syntax could be too strong: clitic climbing and verb-raising might provide evidence for successive head-incorporation and excorporation. He proposed that excorporation of a left-adjuncted head could be manifested by clitic climbing as exemplified in (1). Excorporation from the host of an adjunction could also be manifested by verb raising in Germanic V2 environment: in (2), successive raising of the verbal heads have created a verbal complex had-willen-bellen, out of which had alone is selected by the tense/agreement morphology in I. Movement from within the verbal complex leads to verb-second word order. 1 (1) La 3 volevo [ t 2 chiamare] t 1 ieri. Italian, Roberts (1991) her I.wanted to.call yesterday 'Yesterday I wanted to call her up.' * This paper benefited from presentations at FACL 2009 (U. Arizona), and the workshop on verbal reiteration (Paris). I thank here particularly three Breton native speakers: DL from Quimperlé, H.G. from Scaër and SB from Callac, as well as Herve ar Bihan for their help for the data elicitations. The corpus data from Bijer comes from the database built by Milan Rezac during his post-doc in Nantes, and to which he kindly provided me access. Thanks …