Andrea Zukowski: Noun Compounding Question (reply to Rolf Noyer)

[Martha McGinnis]

Hi all.  This discussion seems to have taken on a life of its own!  But
meanwhile, I am still puzzled.

Rolf had said that MICE is essentially an allomorph of MOUSE.  But the
feature <plural> must be there somewhere in the lexical entry for MICE,
otherwise we would use them interchangeably in a singular context.  At the
very least you'd have to say that MICE  consists of everything (semantically)
that MOUSE consists of, plus a semantic plural value (and this contrasts with
RATS, which consists of the syntactic merger of RAT and the plural morpheme.

[This raises a follow-up question:  If MICE is NOT syntactically plural when
you pull it from the lexicon, will it be necessary to do syntactic merger of
MICE and the plural morpheme whenever you want the produce a clause with the
plural of mouse?  Or is this not necessary because of its semantic plural
value?  And how would you ever be able to tell the difference, given that
there will be no overt change in either case?]

Rolf had said that the compounding constraint falls out of the fact that:

"we do not expect to find /-z/ in morphosyntactic situations where there is
no NP as a whole that is number-marked, as will be the case in noun-
incorporation cases such as the synthetic compounds like RAT-EATER. "

Exactly what is it that predicts this?

To see why I'm struggling, here's a reminder of what happens in Peter
Gordon's test:
An experimenter says "hey, what's this?"  Child says:  a rat!.  Experimenter
says "right, and here are a whole BUNCH of....?"  Child says: "rats!"
Experimenter says "And what do you call someone who eats rats?".  Child says:
"a rat-eater!".

So, the plural form of RAT has just been produced by the child.  And the
experimenter has repeated it back to the child in the compound prompting
question.  The question does not ask for the name of people (plural) who eat
rats (plural), but for the name of someone  (singular) who eats rats
(plural).  So there's never any intention to pluralize the EATER part, but
there are certainly good reasons to pluralize the RAT part, and in fact the
syntactically merged form RATS  is "primed".   What in DM prevents children
from taking that merged form and feeding to a compounding process?
Alternatively, one could ask (if we downplay the priming of RATS), why do
children know that they cannot pluralize the RAT before performing the
compounding operation?  (which really looks awfully a lot like rule ordering)

One final observation:  If it correct that MICE has a different syntacatic
status than RATS (RATS has a merged plural morpheme, MICE does not), this
might make some predictions about acquisition.  For example, if there is an
early stage before the plural rule is derived,  when children produce forms
like RATS but they do so by merely picking them out of their memorized
databank, we might expect that at this stage they would also allow RATS-
EATER.  But then as soon as they show evidence of consistent use of the
plural rule (by overregularizing for example), they should begin to avoid
such compounds.

Andrea