Grammatical Downsizing and The Redistribution of Semantic Wealth

In this paper we explore the consequences of Grammatical Downsizing. Grammatical Downsizing occurs when the rules of morphology, phonology or syntax cause a given formative to be ill-formed in a certain context. We demonstrate with examples from Kannada and Modern Greek that Grammatical Downsizing leads to an extension of the semantic domain of some other formative, redistributing the semantic resources of the grammar onto fewer forms. The central question of this paper is whether the grammar requires a dedicated mechanism of Semantic Redistribution or if the effects of redistribution arise from the interaction of independent principles. Our exploration takes place within the framework of Distributed Morphology (DM) (Halle and Marantz, 1993) in which a level of Morphological Structure (MS) forms the interface between surface-level syntax and phonology. It is at this level that morpho-syntactic features are mapped to phonological features. Two aspects of the DM framework are relevant to the phenomena we observe. One is the idea that the insertion of vocabulary items takes place post-syntactically. While the Kannada data we discuss support the idea of mapping morphosyntactic features to phonological exponents postsyntactically, the Greek data suggest that the range of potential phonological exponents can have a syntactic effect, indicating that the mapping from morphosyntactic feature bundles to phonological forms may take place presyntactically. The second aspect of DM that we are concerned with has to do with two properties of MS: competition between forms and underspecification of features. These properties give rise to semantic redistribution. However, we see that this effect emerges from different principles in the two cases we discuss, suggesting (a) that underspecification cannot account for redistribution by itself, and (b) that a global rule of semantic redistribution may not be neccessary.