Heidi Harley: Gender in DM

[Martha McGinnis]

Hi all --

I'm not sure that the notion of phases is necessary to get these
effects to work out -- although it does add the nice potential of a
lexical/syntactic distinction, so it could well be a good thing. But
it seems to me that as long as insertion is cyclic from the root out,
ala Jonathan, VIs can be conditioned by features introduced by the
root, passing them up as more items are inserted with appropriate
conditioning; no demarcation at the 'n' level necessary. If those
features are introduced just with the root, of course, we don't
expect to see, e.g. MLC-style blocking effects for gender/class, etc,
unless one wants to posit some kind of MLC within Morphology (but we
do expect 'em for number)

Alternatively, one could assert that in languages with gender/class
features, there are simply more choices for the morphosyntactic ROOT
feature that the derivation starts out with -- say, 3 in German --
and then Vocab. Insertion will simply insert roots that are
compatible with the ROOT terminal  that the derivation happens to
have chosen (that in mine & Rolf's terms are Licensed). Root choice
is then not completely free in such languages. On this scenario, of
course, we would expect gender/class to be syntactically active,
merging, copying, being closer to a checker than other gender/class
features, etc.

Actually, I'd like to find out more about why there's a principled
difference between genders and noun classes without actually having
to read anything if anyone wanted to summarize it -- Jonathan?

:) best, hh

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Heidi Harley
Department of Linguistics
Douglass 200E
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721
Ph: (520) 626-3554
Fax: (520) 626-9014
hharley at u.arizona.edu