Nanosyntax is an approach to syntax where the terminal nodes of syntactic parse trees may be reduced to units smaller than a morpheme. Each unit may stand as an irreducible element and not be required to form a further "subtree." Due to its reduction to the smallest terminal possible, the terminals are smaller than morphemes. Therefore, morphemes and words cannot be itemised as a single terminal, and instead are composed by several terminals. As a result, nanosyntax can serve as a solution to phenomena that are inadequately explained by other theories of syntax. Some recent work in theoretical linguistics suggests that the "atoms" of syntax are much smaller than words or morphemes. It then follows that the responsibility of syntax is not limited to ordering "preconstructed" words. Instead, within the framework of nanosyntax, the words are derived entities built into syntax, rather than primitive elements supplied by a lexicon.
History
Theoretical context Nanosyntax arose within the context of other syntactic theories, primarily Cartography and Distributed Morphology. Cartographic syntax theories were highly influential for the thought behind nanosyntax, and the theories share many commonalities. Cartography seeks to provide a syntactic theory that fits within Universal Grammar by charting building blocks and structures of syntax present in all languages. Because Cartography is grounded in empirical evidence, smaller and more detailed syntactic units and structures were being developed to accommodate new linguistic data. Cartography also syntacticizes various domains of grammar, particularly semantics, to varying degrees in different frameworks. For example, elements of semantics which serve grammatical functions, such as features conveying number, tense, or case, are viewed as being a part of semantics. This trend towards including other grammatical domains within syntax is also reflected in nanosyntax. Other elements of cartography that are present in nanosyntax include a universal merge order syntactic categories and right branching trees/leftward movement exclusively. However, cartographic syntax conceptualizes the lexicon as a pre-syntactic repository, which contrasts with the Nanosyntactic view of the lexicon/syntax.
Distributed Morphology provides an alternative to Lexicalist approaches to how the lexicon and syntax interact, that is, with words independently created in the lexicon and then organized using syntax. In Distributed Morphology, the lexicon does not function independently and is instead distributed across many linguistic processes. Both Distributed Morphology and nanosyntax are late insertion models, meaning that syntax is viewed as a pre-lexical/phonological process, with syntactic categories as abstract concepts. Additionally, both theories see syntax as responsible for both sentence- and word-level structure. Despite their many similarities, nanosyntax and Distributed Morphology still differ in a few key areas, particularly with regards to the architecture of how they theorize grammatical domains interacting. Distributed Morphology makes use of a presyntactic list of abstracted roots, functional morphemes, and vocabulary insertion which follows syntactic processes. In contrast, nanosyntax has syntax, morphology, and semantics working simultaneously as part of one domain which interacts throughout the syntactic process to apply lexical elements (the lexicon is a single domain in nanosyntax, while it is spread over multiple domains in Distributed Morphology). See the section Tools of nanosyntax below for more information. Nanosyntactic theory is in direct conflict with theories that adopt views of the lexicon as an independent domain which generates lexical entries apart from any other grammatical domain. An example of such a theory is the Lexical Integrity Hypothesis, which states that syntax has no access to the internal structure of lexical items.
Reasoning
By adopting a theoretic architecture of grammar which does not separate syntactic, morphological, and semantic processes and by allowing terminals to represent sub-morphemic information, nanosyntax is equipped to address various failings and areas of uncertainty in previous theories. One example that supports these tools of nanosyntax is idioms, in which a single lexical item is represented using multiple words whose meaning cannot be determined cumulatively. Because terminals in nanosyntax represent sub-morphemic information, a single morpheme is able to span several terminals, thus creating a subtree. This accommodates the structure of idioms, which are best represented as a subtree representing one morpheme. More evidence for the need for a Nanosyntactic analysis include analyzing irregular plural noun forms and irregular verb inflection (described in more detail in the Nanosyntactic Operations section) and analyzing morphemes which contain multiple grammatical functions (described in more detail in the Tools section).
Nanosyntactic operations Nanosyntax is a theory that seeks to fill in holes left by other theories when they seek to explain phenomena in language. The most notable phenomenon that nanosyntax tackles is that of irregular conjugation. For example, "goose" is irregular in that its plural form is not "gooses", but rather, "geese". This poses a problem to simple syntax, as without additional rules and allowances, "geese" should be found to be a suboptimal candidate for the plural of "goose" in comparison to "gooses".
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