Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy: gender copying and vocabulary insertion (reply to Heidi Harley)

[Martha McGinnis]

Hello

Jonathan Bobaljik's 1999 Maryland Morphology Mayfest paper, mentioned
by Heidi in connection with gender copying, contains ideas that bear
on the general question: When a Vocabulary item is being chosen for
insertion at a given word-structure node, what morphosyntactic
information (if any) *not located at that node* can influence the
choice?  One answer, which uses the metaphor of 'discharge', is:
'Only information that has not yet been discharged through
phonological spell-out'.  Another answer is: 'Only information
encoded by material already phonologically present in the wordform,
e.g. by affixes already added'.  DM of course prefers the first
answer, but the second is implied in Shelly Lieber's approach and
also, I guess, in Kiparskyan level-ordered morphology.  Both have a
ring of plausibility about them.  Which is correct?  Or are both in
some degree correct -- which may suggest that what is really going on
is something different from either?

My article 'Grammatically conditioned allomorphy, paradigmatic
structure, and the Ancestry Constraint' (Transactions of the
Philological Society 99 (2001), 223-45) addresses this directly, with
discussion of Jonathan's Itelmen paper.  I propose a constraint on
grammatically conditioned allomorphy which, though different from
Jonathan's, is consistent with the spirit of DM, I think.  Any
comments and criticisms will be welcome.

Andrew
--
Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy
Professor and Head of Department
Department of Linguistics, University of Canterbury, Private Bag
4800, Christchurch, New Zealand
phone (work) +64-3-364 2211; (home) +64-3-355 5108
fax +64-3-364 2969
e-mail a.c-mcc at ling.canterbury.ac.nz
http://www.ling.canterbury.ac.nz/adc-m.html