Composition and locality: The morphosyntax and phonology of the Russian verbal complex

This dissertation investigates two core architectural research questions: (i) what is the internal morphosyntactic structure of words, and the nature of operations traditionally assigned to derivational morphology?, and (ii) what is the structure of the interface that coordinates these morphosyntactic operations with the phonological structure of words? The empirical basis of the investigation is the Russian verbal complex, in which the relation between morphosyntactic and phonological structure is not straightforward.;I argue that certain types of functional verbal morphology are independent units for the purposes of the syntactic system in the functional spine of the Russian clause. Key evidence for this view comes from a detailed examination of Russian clausal syntax in conjunction with novel evidence from identity conditions on the Russian verb in Verb-Stranding Verb Phrase Ellipsis ( VVPE). The exploration leads to two novel areas of research for Russian. First, I demonstrate that VVPE and argument drop are distinct in Russian, and that, once they are viewed as separate, a previously obscured asymmetry between object and subject drop emerges. Second, I demonstrate that the matching requirement on the verbal complex in VVPE is conditioned primarily by a semantic, rather than lexical, factors.;A second component of the investigation focuses on verbal morphology that is not demonstrably syntactic (lexical prefixes). I consider and compare two alternative accounts of such morphology: one allows for both syntactic composition and constrained morphological composition (along the lines of Ackema and Neeleman 2004); the second excludes the possibility of non-syntactic composition, pursuing an approach in the spirit of Arad (2003) and Embick (2010). I test these approaches with respect to how well they account for the special semantic and syntactic properties of lexical prefixes, exploring exactly where these subtle and nuanced theories make differing predictions.;This discussion lays the groundwork for an investigation of the phonology of the Russian verbal complex, and the connection to its morphosyntactic structure. I demonstrate that the two theories of morphosyntactic composition make strikingly different predictions with respect to possible phonological structures. I argue that the cyclic spell-out by phase approach developed within Distributed Morphology makes strong, but incorrect, predictions for the bracketing paradoxes instantiated by certain Russian prefix-verb combinations. I demonstrate that these bracketing paradoxes are, in the phonology, partially optimizing, and I develop an approach, based on the Ackema and Neeleman (2004) model of word formation, in which constrained morphological composition is permitted as part of a larger syntactic module, communicating with phonology by passing a certain amount of structure to an Optimality Theoretic system for phonological evaluation.;The dissertation makes empirical contributions in the domains of Russian ellipsis and argument drop and by re-analyzing a broader range of data related to Russian prefixal bracketing paradoxes. In the theoretical domain, the investigation has consequences for our understanding of the nature of morphosyntactic composition, verb phrase ellipsis, cyclicity (both syntactic and phonological) and the syntax-phonology interface.