Postsyntactic Lowering and linear relations in Dagur noun phrases

Abstract

In this paper, I investigate the unusual order between case and possessive morphemes in the endangered Mongolic language Dagur. It is observed in many languages that the case morpheme follows possessive markers, but Dagur uniformly exhibits the morpheme order where possessive follows case in its nominal domain. Based on novel data from fieldwork, I propose that such order is due to postsyntactic Lowering, in which the head of K(ase)P lowers to Poss(essive) head. The evidence for the Lowering analysis comes from suspended affixation in this language. In particular, suspended affixation involving CASE and POSS morphemes displays unusual patterns, compared to the suspension of other types of morphemes. Further investigation reveals that Dagur suspended affixation is best analyzed as a base-generated structure, instead of morpheme ellipsis. Given these, the Lowering analysis correctly derives the POSS-final order and successfully accounts for the unusual patterns in suspended affixation. In addition, I examine surface morphophonological differences between the CASE and the POSS morphemes, and show that they can be systematically encoded in the current theory.