Martha McGinnis: A follow-up (reply to Mark Volpe)

[Martha McGinnis]

Dear Mark,

Again, I'm not sure that 'early insertion' of roots, as in
GB, Minimalism, LFG, etc., addresses the issue you've
raised.  As far as I can see, the issue concerns the
interface between the interpretive system and the grammar.
You seem to be asking how a theory with post-syntactic
interpretation (like GB) ensures that appropriate lexical
items are chosen.

In my understanding, DM doesn't insist that interpretation
is purely post-syntactic.  One possibility is that the
entire derivation is accessible to the interpretive system
-- from lexical selection and syntactic combination to
Vocabulary insertion.  I recall Alec Marantz suggesting
in class lectures that "all choices are interpreted":
the derivation is interpreted to the extent that it
makes choices among possible options.  Such choices
occur at every stage of a derivation.  Chomsky's recent
work takes a similar line: he argues that the derivation
is sent off to PF and LF in a series of subchunks ('phases').
I believe an 'interpret-all-choices' approach also bears
some resemblance to Levelt's model, in which (as I recall)
the conceptual/intentional system drives the selection of
'lemmas' from the lexicon, but is also informed (via
feedback) of later stages of the syntactic derivation,
including the  selection of phonological 'lexemes'.

Perhaps you can find an empirical argument that the
under/overgeneration issue you raise is connected to
the issue of early vs. late insertion of roots, but
otherwise the two seem to be independent.  One
issue that does arise under late insertion is how
to deal with the apparent suppletion of roots.  For
example, is 'people' a suppletive plural of 'person'?
Does 'people' spell out a root or a functional node?
If all roots compete for insertion, as DM assumes, then
'people' can't be a root specified as plural (nor
'person' a root specified as singular) because such
roots would block the insertion of roots not specified
as singular or plural, like 'human' or 'cat'. So under
DM, either this is not true suppletion (it's more like
the relation of 'cow' to 'cattle') or else 'person' can
spell out a functional (non-root) node, which lacks
Encyclopedic content.  How could we distinguish the two
possibilities empirically?  This would be an interesting
issue to explore -- I'm not sure how much has been written
about it.

Regards,
Martha

mcginnis at ucalgary.ca