Carson Schütze: gender copying and vocabulary insertion

[Martha McGinnis]

Hi everyone,
I have a question about the treatment of gender concord in DM, which either
wasn't answered in the earlier discussion of gender in DM more generally, or
else I'm not able to extract the answer from the many larger issues in that
discussion.

Here's the context. I've been reading Roland Pfau's dissertation on
analyzing speech errors in DM (which I highly recommend, by the way,
especially for those interested in "architecture" issues). He reports a
striking finding about noun substitution slips in German and their effect on
gender marking in the containing DP (which I'll omit for brevity). He then
proposes an explanation in DM that rests on the following claim that he
attributes, I think correctly, as a principle endowed upon DM by its
Creators:  In the MS/SpellOut component, all operations on terminal nodes,
including fusion, feature insertion (if that's how you do subject-verb
agreement), merger, feature copying, etc., must precede Vocab Insertion.

This has the consequence that if, just at the point of Vocab Insertion, the
target noun root gets erroneously replaced with a different root of a
different gender, it could not happen that the gender inflections elsewhere
in that DP would be adjusted to match the gender of the intruder root.
That's because once we begin Vocab Insertion, we aren't allowed to do
feature copying anymore, so in particular we aren't allowed to copy the
newly-arrived gender feature of the intruder noun onto the determiner & adj
next to it. Thus, even if that D and A haven't yet themselves been spelled
out (undergone Vocab Insertion), they'll be stuck spelling out as the forms
appropriate to the gender of the original target noun, in this case
mismatching the (intruder) noun actually uttered.

There are all sorts of interesting issues here, but the one I'm focusing on
at the moment is this: What was the motivation for prohibiting operations
like feature copying after Vocab Insertion has begun? Was this simply an a
priori way to limit the power of the system, perhaps conceptually motivated,
or did they have in mind particular conceivable empirical phenomena that
never occur that this prohibition was designed to rule out?

Apologies if this is in the published literature somewhere.

thanks,

     Carson