Presyntactic Morphology or Postsyntactic Morphology and Explanatoriness in The Basque Auxiliary

Abstract We provide a counterpoint to Kiparsky’s “The morphology of the Basque auxiliary: Thoughts on Arregi & Nevins 2012” (Kiparsky this volume), an Optimality-Theoretic Lexicalist Morphology (LM) reanalysis of the Basque auxiliary systems that were characterized within a Distributed Morphology (DM) analysis in our book Morphotactics (Arregi & Nevins 2012). We discuss two of its major claims: that the derivational architecture of DM does not model opacity as closely as it should, and that it does not provide a satisfactory account of the types of word- and subword-level constituents. Our broadest conclusion is that comparison of different ways to model the microvariation in these phenomena—and perhaps in morphological explanation more generally—cannot be reduced to counting which analysis has “fewer,” partially overlapping modules, or which uses rules and constraints versus “only constraints,” but rather which specific set of generalizations and proposals lead to a better understanding of the nature and limits of the constraints and repairs that characterize Basque auxiliaries.