Nanosyntax Foundations and Form-Meaning Mismatches

This course will present the basics of Nanosyntax (Starke 2009, Caha 2009, Baunaz & Lander 2018, Caha et al. 2024), including the matching condition and its well-known Superset Effect, the structure of the lexicon, and the lexicalisation algorithm with its newest implementations. The course will also discuss how Nanosyntax finds its origins in the cartographic tradition and will provide comparisons with another Late Insertion Theory, namely Distributed Morphology.
In addition, attention will be paid to how form-meaning mismatches can be dealt with from a nanosyntactic perspective, drawing on case studies from the empirical domains of negation, causative-inchoative alternations, degree morphology and TAM morphology.