The Ups and Downs of Pruning: Reply to Paparounas (2024)

Abstract In this response, we critically engage with Paparounas’s (2024) head-adjacency analysis of Greek verbal morphology. While challenging Merchant’s (2015) spanning analysis, Paparounas (2024) does not provide a better alternative, as it faces serious shortcomings upon closer scrutiny. Consequently, the novel analytical claims concerning Greek verbal morphology, alongside broader theoretical implications, lose their foundational support. Our critique focuses on Embick’s (2010) Pruning mechanism. In particular, we show that the Greek data fail to substantiate Paparounas’s claims regarding (a) the purportedly destructive nature of Pruning, rendering a Pruned node incapable of conditioning another morphological rule, or (b) the timing of its application. Furthermore, Pruning, as is applied in Paparounas (2024), suffers from look-ahead (Moskal and Smith 2016), which makes the entire analysis incompatible with a head-adjacency-based approach. Ultimately, however, we argue that strict head-adjacency-based analyses, such as that of Paparounas, which rely exclusively on late insertion rules to account for allomorphy and suppletion, are fundamentally flawed, irrespective of destructivity and look-ahead.