Dissimilation at the Interface: Nominalization as the Key to a Longstanding Puzzle

Abstract

The narrow goal is to provide a complete account of the doubl-ing effect (Ross 1972) within a Minimalist and Distributed Morphology § I am indebted to a number of helpful hands who have helped shape this work too many to properly thank. I would like to express special gratitude to audiences at the Arizona Linguistics Circle, the University of Kansas, the University of Illinois, and Nominals at the Interface at Songang University along with Heidi Harley, Jason Haugen, Scott Jackson, Vicki Carstens, Stacey Sloboda, Ulrich Reichhard, Bridget Samuels, and Carrie Gillon of Quick Fox Consulting. All errors and oversights remain my own. Jeffrey Punske Assistant Professor, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, USA Email: punske@siu.edu Received 24 September, 2018; Revised 8 December, 2018; Accepted 10 January, 2019 Copyright © 2019 Language Research Institute, Sejong University Journal of Universal Language is an Open Access Journal. All articles are distributed online under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 40 Dissimilation at the Interface: Nominalization as the Key to a Longstanding Puzzle approach. In particular, I examine the effect within nominals and show that the pattern can be fully captured via the interaction of previous analyses: structural differences based on whether the nominals are complex event nominals (Grimshaw 1990), local dislocation of the -ing affix (Punske 2016), and Distinctness (Richards 2010). I show that this account is fully compatible with full facts of the phenomenon and discuss other possible dissimilation effects that may be explored in the future.