RU Cyclic Optimization

Principal investigators: Prof. Dr. Jochen Trommer & Dr. Eva Zimmermann
Project description
 

This project is a direct continuation of the project Morphological strata of tone. It extends our empirical investigation of stratal effects to more tonal data and investigates 1) interstratal differences for more tonal processes, 2) innerstratal cycles, and 3) processes restricted by phrasal prosody. Empirically, it tests the *ABA-restriction against a larger and more diverse typological study and hence systematicizes whether and how tonal processes that are sensitive to morpho-syntactic domains can be combined freely within a given language. Theoretically, it will further establish Harmonic Layer Theory, the novel account to the morpho-phonology interface that we developed in the first phase of the project. This model is more restrictive than alternatives like Stratal OT since it is based on a cyclic optimization with a single grammar for each language. Interstratal differences can hence only arise from the monotonic activity decay of phonological elements; a mechanism that inherently excludes *ABA-patterns. 

Principal investigators: Paula Fenger, PhD & Prof. Dr. Gereon Müller

This project is a continuation of the project Prospects of Inflectional Morphology in Harmonic Serialism, in which the goal was to show that the pre-syntactic lexical-realizational developed model in Müller (2020) can cover roughly the same ground as more established models like Distributed Morphology or Paradigm Function Morphology. At the same time the goal was to show that the approach can offer new and convincing solutions in the areas of impoverishment, exponent drop, deponency, paradigmatic gaps, and morphological movement. The harmonic serialist approach connects cyclicity (both cyclic operations in the morphology as well as cyclic interactions between morphology and phonology) with optimization (with optimality-theoretic determinations of well-formed outputs during the derivation).

In the course of answering the research questions, the focus of the project increasingly shifted to the aspect of cyclicity. In addition, it has become clear that for many questions the difference between pre- and post-syntactic morphology is far less decisive than is often assumed; apart from this, for various phenomena under consideration, it has been shown that a direct influence of syntactic operations on morphological realization is not implausible. Against this background, the second phase of the project  shifts in focus towards the concept of cyclicity, within the framework of the post-syntactic lexical-realization model of Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz (1994); Kramer, Alexiadou, Marantz & Oltra-Massuet (2025)), with the continued consideration of optimization methods. These further thematic developments are accompanied by the addition of a second project leader, whose research focuses on the role of cyclicity in inflectional morphology (Fenger (2020)).

On closer inspection, it turns out that cyclicity is indeed a key factor in serial  lexical-realizational theories such as Distributed Morphology, but that a  detailed examination of this concept with reference to grammatical building blocks such as the Cyclic Principle and the Strict Cycle beyond Bobaljik (2000) has not yet been accomplished and there are a large number of open open questions that will be addressed in the second phase of the project, e.g. with regard to impoverishment, extended exponence and contextual allomorphy, deponency, overabundance, periphrasis, portmanteaux, and agreement exponents. A guiding idea throughout will be that morphological realization, with the assumption of Cyclic Spell-Out  can or must  in many cases cope with incomplete or incomplete or defective sets of morpho-syntactic features.

Principal investigator: Dr. Philipp Weisser

This project is a direct continuation of the projekt Prosodically determined dislocation of coordinators and it aims to expand and strengthen the results of the first project phase in three ways. 
First, we want to expand the empirical scope of the first project phase and create a comprehensive typology of an entirely new phenomenon, namely of Question markers in non-canonical positions. In doing so, we can compare the results of the new typology with the one on non-canonical coordinators compiled in the first project phase. The second goal of the project is to establish the theoretical model created in the first project phase as a general model of second position clitics (and clitics more generally). To do this, we will conduct several independent case studies about claims in the literature which seem to contradict the predictions of our model and we will investigate to what extent the model at hand needs to be revised or to what extent the data can be reanalyzed. Finally, we want to investigate what consequences our investigation of second position clitics has for theories of the syntax-prosody mapping. Our model makes clear predictions about the mapping procedure, the validity of which we will investigate in concrete case studies. 

Principal investigator: Prof. Dr. Barbara Stiebels
Continuation of the project Optimal matches between clause-embedding predicates and their clausal complements

The project deals with the impact of morphological derivation on the clausal selection profile of clause-embedding predicates (CEPs). Previous research on word formation rarely considered CEPs as bases for derivation, and if so, the effects on the clausal selection profile were not investigated at all. In the case of category-changing derivation such as nominalization (behaupten ‘claim’ → Behaupt-ung ‘claim’) and adjectivization (denken ‘think’ → denk-bar ‘thinkable’), the question arises as to what extent differences between base and target category lead to changes in the clausal selection profile. Which selectional properties are preserved, which are blocked?  Is there a qualitative difference to the effects of category-preserving derivation (e.g. in the formation of prefix and particle verbs; denken ‘think’ → nach-denken ‘be thinking about’, be-denken ‘consider’)? In many cases, the latter results in a stronger semantic modification of the SEP, which leads us to expect stronger effects, especially in the case of meaning-dependent selectional properties. 

The clausal selection properties to be considered in the project include clause type, verb mood (e.g. subjunctive), control properties/raising in infinitive complements, NEG-raising and semantic entailments. The effects of nominalization, adjectivization and verb-verb derivation on the embedding behaviour of SEPs are investigated. In continuation of the research from the first application phase on optimal matches between CEPs  and their clausal complements, it will also be investigated to what extent the optimization strategies that were identified for the interpretation of polysemous or vague SEPs (e.g. role of the verb mode in Spanish sentir: 'regret' in the subjunctive/'feel' in the indicative) are preserved or modified in the derivation. Finally, a further aspect of the study is the question of the interpretation of complex synthetic compounds CEPs as heads (e.g. Organ-spende-bereitschaft ‘willingness to donate an organ’). In these maximally reduced structures, which hardly allow any optimization, the role of the semantic relation of CEP (willingness) and dependent predicate (donation) for the interpretation of the complex structure becomes particularly clear.

Principal investigator: Prof. Dr. Jochen Trommer
Project description

This project is a direct continuation of Semantic and Phonological Correlates of Affix Order in the first phase of the research unit in investigating systematic correlations between phonological properties of affixes and their linear order from the perspective of a statal approach to morphophonology. Its goal is to further corroborate the evidence for the theoretical approach  to affix order developed in the earlier project in three ways: 1. Testing the approach by in-depth applications to single languages with complex morphological systems for which we have conducted pilot studies. 2. Extending the investigation of phonological ordering correlates to additional types of affixes, especially those where semantics seems to be largely irrelevant (e.g. agreement). 3.  Integrating empirical and theoretical results of the other projects concerning the order of affixes and clitics in the Cyclic Optimization research group with our approach.

Principal investigator: Prof. Dr. Gereon Müller

Classical approaches to A and A-bar movement based on designated positions (Chomsky (1981; 1993), Deprez (1989), Mahajan (1990)) have been shown to be empirically problematic because they are at variance with movement types showing variable behaviour with respect to A and A-bar properties. They are also conceptually dubious because defining 
the relevant positions is far from simple, and because grammatical building blocks must explicitly refer to the relevant information (e.g., reflexivization demands A binding, not just binding, 
parasitic gaps require an A-bar binder, not just a binder, etc.). This is incompatible with basic minimalist tenets. 

Upon closer inspection, current approaches based on features rather than positions (van Urk (2015), Colley & Privoznov (2021), Scott (2021), Chen (2023), Lohninger (2024)) face exactly the same problems. Empirically, despite some claims to the contrary, a mixed behaviour of movement types (e.g., of scrambling) can only be accomodated in a very limited way, with absence of intervention effects emerging as basically the only A-bar property of otherwise A-like movement types that is easily accountable for (e.g., the approaches in van Urk (2015) and Lohninger (2024) do not permit a co-occurrence of parasitic gap licensing and weak crossover circumvention with a single movement type, but such a pattern is well established). Conceptually, grammatical building blocks regulating the interacting operations (reflexivization, bound variable pronouns licensing, parasitic gap licensing, reconstruction, improper movement, 
etc.) still need to make reference to the status of movement as A or A-bar. Furthermore, it is not quite clear what features should be identified for determining A and A-bar movement: phi features and information-structural features, although widely adopted for this purpose, can be shown not to suffice in many cases. 

The conceptual problem with all these recent approaches is addressed by the analyses in Safir (2019), Boskovic (2024), and Hewett (2024), which postulate that there is a categorical difference between A and A-bar movement that can be traced back to the counter-cyclic addition of a shell to A-bar moved items in the course of the derivation. Again, however, these approaches face problems with a mixed behaviour of movement types (and there is no independent evidence for the shells). 

In view of this state of affairs, the project pursues an approach in terms of derivational timing according to which the A/A-bar distinction reduces to the question whether c-command is 
possible or not at the relevant stage of the derivation: If movement precedes some interacting process, there is feeding and bleeding (``A movement''); if movement follows the other process, there is counter-feeding and counter-bleeding (``A-bar movement''). This approach can account for both categorical and mixed behaviour of movement types by relying on restrictive concepts of cyclicity and optimization.

Principal investigator: Prof. Dr. Fabian Heck

The project investigates the phenomenon of multiple case assignment (MCA) from a syntactic as well as a morphological perspective. MCA means that one and the same argument receives more than one case value/ case feature in the syntax. Although MCA is well motivated both conceptually and empirically, most current syntactic theorizing does not take it into account. Accordingly, a comprehensive theory of MCA is still missing. On the syntactic side, it will be investigated whether MCA is to be characterized best by case overwriting, case
accumulation, or case extension. Depending on the choice being made in the syntax the mechanisms that regulate the realization of multiply case-marked arguments (``case-resolution'') may differ. Theoretical options are PF-encapsulation by cyclic spell-out, a strictly monotonic case assignment algorithm that is based on case extension, or some purely morphological resolution strategy. By developing a theory of MCA, the project also aims at providing new perspectives on phenomena originally not related to (multiple) case.
 

Principal investigator: Paula Fenger, PhD

It has been noted in the literature that many languages are not able to form a prohibitive by combining the imperative with the basic clausal negation. Instead they require a repair, leading to various constructions expressing the same meaning. The existing theoretical analyses focus on a couple of repair strategies across a small set of languages. However, in the typological literature a much wider range of repairs for this ban has been reported, but clear generalizations are not yet available.  In this project the aim is to bridge the gap between  the typological and the theoretical literature. 

The goals of the project are two-fold: On the one hand, a systematic database of imperatives and prohibitives will be built, taking into account variation across and within different language families, and developing diagnostics to determine when and what repair will be chosen in a given language. On the other hand, a theory will be developed, that will be cyclic, and will hypothesize that all variation in repair structures comes from variation of the strength of heads in the clausal spine. 

Principal investigator: Prof. Gregory Kobele, PhD

• Principal Investigator: Prof. Gereon Müller
  Website of the project

This project pursues a strictly derivational, cyclic, optimization-based approach to inflectional morphology that offers new perspectives on phenomena like affix order, extended exponence, disjunctive blocking, apparently non-local stem allomorphy, and *ABA patterns; beyond that it will primarily be investigated for recalcitrant concepts like impoverishment, exponent drop, deponency, paradigmatic gaps, morphological movement, discontinuous bleeding, and learning algorithms for underspecification.

• Principal Investigators: Prof. Jochen Trommer & Dr. Eva Zimmermann
  Website of the project

This projects explores a novel cyclic optimization theory that explains recurring problems in the morpho-phonology of tone.

• Principal Investigators: Prof. Barbara Stiebels & Prof. Jochen Trommer
  Website of the project

This subproject studies the role of Phonology and Semantics for the linearization of affixes.

• Principal Investigator: Jun.Prof. Maria Kouneli
  Website of the project

The goal of this project is to investigate grammatical number in the nominal and verbal domain of Eastern Sudanic languages, and to investigate whether a cyclic optimization approach is better-suited to account for the attested cross-linguistic variation.

• Principal Investigator: Prof. Fabian Heck
  Website of the project

The project investigates the empirical and formal properties of repair phenomena in syntax that can be characterized as "last resort" operations.

• Principal Investigator: Dr. Philipp Weisser
  Website of the project

The topic of this project is dislocation of clausal and phrasal coordinators, i.e., elements such as 'and', 'or', or 'but' which do not surface in the linear position in between the two coordinands they connect but rather inside one of their conjuncts. The goal of this project is to investigate the consequences of this process for theories of clitic placement and the syntax-prosody interface.

• Principal Investigator: Prof. Barbara Stiebels
  Website of the project

The project studies the linguistic means to improve the match between clause-embedding predicates and their clausal complements (e.g. by semantic enrichment of the complement clause or coercion/semantic shift of the clause-embedding predicate).

• Principal Investigator: Prof. Gregory Kobele
  Website of the project

What is cyclic optimization? What distinguishes it empirically from theories employing other mechanisms? How could the human sentence processing mechanism work, if based on a cyclically optimizing grammar?

The intuition behind cyclic models of grammars is that the same operations (or types of operations) apply iteratively in increasingly bigger morphosyntactic domains. A simple version of this idea is interleaving syntactic or morphological structure-building operations with interpretive or restructuring operations. Thus, in Chomsky’s Minimalist Syntax, the basic operation Merge is structure-building in creating hierarchical syntactic representations ("trees") whereas the alternating operation Agree just modifies the featural content of syntactic units, or, under a slightly different perspective, adds information for morphological interpretation. Similarly in Lexical Phonology and Stratal Optimality Theory, phonological rules are cyclically interleaved with morphological structure building.  Cyclicity, although often not under this label, is found in a broad array of theoretical work, for example also in different versions of Construction Grammar, and classical grammar formalisms which apply compositional semantics to syntactic representations based on phrase structure grammar or Categorial Grammar. 

Optimization is a grammatical procedure which chooses among different potential alternatives and blocks suboptimal alternatives, based on a structured set of criteria. A classical case is the Elsewhere Condition, which captures, for example, the fact that more specific morphological realizations block more general ones, such as the blocking of the potential English plural forms *ox-es by the listed form ox-en. Optimization in the broad sense envisaged here underlies not only Optimality Theory and Harmonic Grammar, but also psycholinguistic race models, analogy-based models, and last-resort and repair operations in derivational approaches to syntax.

A standard intuition in formal models of morphology is that a specific word form like the German dative plural Kind-er-n 'to children' is computed by choosing affixes which optimize the realization of inflectional features. This explains directly  why this form is not just realized as Kind-er, where the dative feature remains unrealized.  Cyclicity is a simple means to capture affix order in this form, for example by the assumption that -er is an inner/stem-forming, and -n an outer/word-level affix, and are attached to the root Kind in this order:  

Both models alone do not explain why the apparently superfluous plural -er must be used in addition to dative plural -n.  However, combining both cyclicity and optimization, we may assume that optimization applies in cycles. In the inner (stem) cycle only -er is available, and adding it realizes a dative plural input better (although not perfectly) than the bare root. In the outer cycle, adding also -en allows for realizing even more of the input features. That the previously added -er cannot be removed at that step follows then from another standard assumption of cyclic theories that effects of earlier cycles are immune to later modification.  

Cyclic Optimization is currently investigated  in  three different lines of research:

First, approaches combining standard OT-optimization with elements of rule-based Lexical Phonology assuming qualitatively different phonological subgrammars that are cyclically interleaved with morphosyntactic levels of increasing size such as Stem, Word and Phrase (Kiparsky 2000, 2015, Bermúdez-Otero 2012, Rubach 2003). Cyclic Optimization also underlies the major formalizations of Construction Phonology (Orgun 1996, Inkelas 2014) and Morphology (Inkelas & Caballero 2013).

Second, a version of CO has independently been developed in derivational approaches to cyclic effects in syntax based on the insight that there is a parametric language-specific choice between Merge and Agree operations at a given derivational step in Minimalist grammars, which can be naturally captured by violable constraints (Müller 2009). Integrating cyclicity and optimization is also suggested by the growing evidence that one of the central mechanism of derivational minimalism, establishing a phase, does not apply deterministically in derivations, but can be delayed resulting in "dynamic" phases (Bobaljik & Wurmbrand 2005, den Dikken 2007, Boškovic 2014, Harwood 2015).

The third and most recent line of research leading to CO is work in iterative optimization approaches especially Harmonic Serialism (HS) and Optimality Theory with Candidate Chains (OT-CC), which inherently employ a kind of porto-cyclicity: operations of different types are iteratively interleaved. Under the natural assumption that a single serial OT-grammar optimizes both morphosyntax and phonology, HS inherently instantiates a full-fledged cyclic model of grammar. A version of OT-CC which makes this explicit is th

Representative research in Leipzig related to Cyclicity and Optimization

• Müller, G. 2020. Inflectional morphology in Harmonic Serialism. London: Equinox. 
• Trommer, J. & S. Bank. 2017. Inflectional learning as local optimization. Morphology 27. 383–422. 
• Heck, F. & G. Müller. 2016. On accelerating and decelerating movement. From Minimalist preference principles to Harmonic Serialism. In G. Legendre, M. Putnam, H. de Swart & E. Zaroukian (eds.), Optimality-theoretic syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, 78–110. Oxford University Press. 
• Trommer, J. 2013. Stress uniformity in Albanian: morphological arguments for cyclicity. Linguistic Inquiry 44(1). 109–143. 
• Zimmermann, E. 2020. Two is too much. . . in the phonology! A phonological account of unfaithful multiple reduplication. The Linguistic Review. 
• Weisser, Ph. 2019. On the symmetry of case in conjunction. Syntax 23(1). 42–77. 
• Kouneli, M. 2018. Plural marking on mass nouns: Evidence from Greek. In M. Dali, É. Mathieu & G. Zareikar (eds.), Gender and noun classification, 234–248. Oxford University Press. 
• Stiebels, B. 2010. Inhärente Kontrollprädikate im Deutschen. Linguistische Berichte 224. 391–440. 
• Heinz, J. & G. M. Kobele & J. A. Riggle 2009. Evaluating the Complexity of Optimality Theory. Linguistic Inquiry 40(2). 277–288. 
• Heck, F. 2000. Tiefenoptimierung – Deutsche Wortstellung als wettbewerbsgesteuerte Basisgenerierung. Linguistische Berichte 184. 441–468.