This talk is centered around the nature of spell-out, specifically how the hierarchical structure created by the syntactic component is translated into a phonological string. This is done primarily through the exploration of two aspects of penultimate vowel lengthening in Chichewa (Kanerva 1990; Downing & Mtenje 2011a,b): a) the absence of left edge effects of domains, i.e., that domain effects are only observed when elements follow the domain, and b) branchingness effects, i.e. where domain effects are only observed in modified DPs. Both of these effects have been argued to show the necessity for an indirect reference to syntactic domains in the calculating phonological domains as they cannot be derived directly solely from syntactic domains (see e.g., Selkirk 2011; Cheng & Downing 2016; Bonet et al. 2018). I argue however that these conclusions stem from theoretical assumptions that are not intrinsic to cyclic spell-out, namely the holding-bin approach, i.e., the assumption that the spelled-out string should not be influenced by any domain-external elements. Once such assumptions are dispensed with the effects observed follow directly from the syntax.
In this talk, I reanalyze data discussed in (Kanerva 1990; Downing & Mtenje 2011a,b), and extend to it a spell-out procedure proposed in Harðarson (2021) for word-internal do- main mismatches. I show that once the holding-bin approach is dispensed with and the structure of the DP is taken into account, the edge effects do follow from cyclic spell-out, and branchingness effects follow from the movement of the noun out of the complement of D. Preliminary investigation also shows promise for extending this approach to, e.g., the lexical XP phrasing observed in Chimwiini (see, e.g. Selkirk 1986) and other cross-linguistic variations in the phrasing of arguments.
