Nanosyntax

Nanosyntax is an approach to syntax where the terminal nodes of syntactic parse trees may be reduced to units smaller than a morpheme.

work in theoretical linguistics suggests that the "atoms" of syntax are much smaller than words or morphemes.

Instead, within the framework of nanosyntax,[3] the words are derived entities built into syntax, rather than primitive elements supplied by a lexicon.

Cartography seeks to provide a syntactic theory that fits within Universal Grammar by charting building blocks and structures of syntax present in all languages.

Because Cartography is grounded in empirical evidence, smaller and more detailed syntactic units and structures were being developed to accommodate new linguistic data.

Cartography also syntacticizes various domains of grammar, particularly semantics, to varying degrees in different frameworks.

[4] Other elements of cartography that are present in nanosyntax include a universal merge order syntactic categories and right branching trees/leftward movement exclusively.

[7] Both Distributed Morphology and nanosyntax are late insertion models, meaning that syntax is viewed as a pre-lexical/phonological process, with syntactic categories as abstract concepts.

[4][8] Despite their many similarities, nanosyntax and Distributed Morphology still differ in a few key areas, particularly with regards to the architecture of how they theorize grammatical domains interacting.

Distributed Morphology makes use of a presyntactic list of abstracted roots, functional morphemes, and vocabulary insertion which follows syntactic processes.

[9] By adopting a theoretic architecture of grammar which does not separate syntactic, morphological, and semantic processes and by allowing terminals to represent sub-morphemic information, nanosyntax is equipped to address various failings and areas of uncertainty in previous theories.

One example that supports these tools of nanosyntax is idioms, in which a single lexical item is represented using multiple words whose meaning cannot be determined cumulatively.

It is also considered lacking in the face of morphological concepts such as that displayed by the Wug test wherein children are able to correctly conjugate a previously unheard nonsense noun from its singular to its plural.

Since it uses a formula and not rote memorisation of lexical items, it bypasses the challenges brought forth by a word-based treatment, and due to the arrangement of heads and their precedence, also provides a solution to the optimality concerns of Distributed Morphology.

Caha proposed that there is a hierarchy in case as follows from broadest to narrowest: Dative, Genitive, Accusative, Nominative.

Therefore, there are several possibilities in syncretism patterns, namely AAAA, AAAB, AABB, ABBB, AABC, ABBC and ABCC.

Nanosyntax provides an explanation by positing that the initial vowel has a separate node from the rest of the morpheme in a subtree.

[14] The Nanosyntactic approach results in an ordering of affixes that poses a problem for head movement, which has caused some debate.

[19] The suggestion of an additional workspace for complex heads conceptualizes that the prefixal element is created in a separate space.

Thereafter, it combines antecedently with the remaining structure in the primary workspace, allowing the assembled item to maintain its internal ordering of features.

[4] Nanosyntax uses a handful of tools in order to map out fine-grained elements of the language being analyzed.

Beyond Spellout Principles, there are three main tools for this system based on the writings of Baunaz, Haegeman, De Clercq, and Lander in Exploring Nanosyntax.

[21] This system combines two distinct morphosyntactic structures on the surface of a sentence: such as two grammar functions that are contained within a single lexical form.

[21] This observation of a syncretism comes from work investigating patterns of the readings of words such as goal "to", route "via", and location "at" cross-linguistically performed by linguistics as suggested by Svenonius.