Cristian Iscrulescu's USC dissertation is called
The Phonological Dimension of Grammatical Markedness — a title which has of course attracted my attention. Iscrulescu studies the phenomenon that grammatically marked structures in some languages allow more phonologically marked structures; e.g. the plural forms are systematically more complex than the singulars. ?is examples are mainly from Old Saxon, Romanian and Mayak.
In order to analyse this, Iscrulescu proposes that there are licensing constraints which say e.g. 'palatalised consonants need to occur in the plural' (if a consonant is palatalised, it needs to occur in a plural form).
Iscrulescu only discusses one possible consequence of this: the morphosyntactically unmarked forms disallow certain phonological complexities (and therefore we find reduction, etc.). Logically speaking, one might expect that a way of satisfying the licensing constraints would be to turn a phonologically complex singular into a morphological plural. This is an absurd result, but it is not entirely clear how it can be prevented. (Well, it is clear how this can be done, viz. by assuming absolute faithfulness of Morphological Structure, but Iscrulescu does not say so explicitly.)
My own preferred solution to this type of problem is based on an Items-and-Arrangement view of morphology, and the concept of morpheme expression: the plural is underlyingly marked and there is a constraint Express-plural (a special type of faithfulness: at least some part of the plural morpheme needs to be expressed in the phonology). Iscrulescu briefly discusses this alternative (on pp. 225–229), but this is not the most satisfactory part of the thesis. His arguments are:
- Realize-Morpheme approaches are "blind as to the specific way in which the plural morpheme is
realized, as long as there is detectable phonological material affiliated to it." I consider this almost to be an argument in favour of Realize-Morpheme: the specific way in which the morpheme is realized is now left to the (hopefully independently established) phonological well-formedness of the language in question.
- The other objection is that RM "potentially overgenerate[s]". The idea is that if we have RM-singular, we could rank this constraint topmost, and generate a language in which the singular is more complex than the plural. Iscrulescu attributes the idea to my friend Nina Topintzi, but I think it does not hold. The fact that there are apparently no languages with more complex singulars than plurals only means that either (i) singular is not a feature (number features are monovalent) and need not be realised, or (ii) we need to posit a universal ranking RM-plural >> RM-singular, exactly parallel to a similar stipulation that Iscrulescu needs to make.
The most crucial evidence in favour of Iscrulescu's approach and against RM would come from a language in which the 'more marked' phonology means less structure; for instance schwa is arguably 'marked' in the sense that not all languages have it, so there needs to be a constraint against it. On the other hand, it has also arguably less structure than other vowels. So a language in which schwa can only occur in plurals but not in singulars could not be analysed in an RM approach, but it could be understood in terms of Licensing of marked structures in morphologically complex positions. Unfortunately, Iscrulescu does not provide such examples; in all of his examples, the morphologically complex structures also involve more phonological material.