Partitivity in Romance and the syntax-morphology connection

Abstract

This paper claims that the relationship between morphology and syntax is multidirectional. It argues against the generally accepted position in LFG that word formation feeds the syntax and that syntax cannot feed word formation. The proposal is that the rules of inflectional morphology take f-structure information, together with other information, as their input. The main argument for this claim is provided by the comparative analysis of two Romance languages, one with the partitive affix and one without it. The observation that languages without the partitive affix have null indefinite objects, whereas languages with this affix seemingly do not, follows straightforwardly only if we assume that syntax feeds word formation.