Asymmetries in Form and Meaning: Surface Realization and Interface Conditions

This paper addresses the issue of how languages pac kage the same features of meaning into morphophonological units of differ- ent sizes, giving rise to mismatches between surfac e form and meaning. A contrastive study of causativ es in Japanese and East- ern Armenian shows that the same syntactic properti es and semantic information are surfaced as a singl e word in Japanese while they are realized as a phrase in Eastern Armenian. The paper provides an account for the distinct surf ace realizations of similar causative constructions in these two languages base d on interface relations between syntax and the PF and LF components. In particular, it is argued that the different surface realizations of predicates across languages can be captured by a language param- eter that determines the spell-out to the PF interf ace.