Mark Volpe: Let me try your patience, one last time. (reply to Martha McGinnis)

[Martha McGinnis]

Dear DM-Listers,
    Forgive me, especially Martha, and thanks for your
responses. I'm not at all advocating early insertion.
I'm a strong supporter of DMs position that phonologic
realization of morpho-syntactic features should be
post-syntactic, moreover, that syntax should make use
of only abstract features (w/1 possible exception).
The premise I'm trying to explore is whether such a
post-syntactic phonological realization of abstract
features is compatible with an early *selection* of
Open-Class items, i.e., Roots. Perhaps the early
selection (but not insertion) of underived Roots would
be able to insure that Unaccusative structures are
built for Unaccusatives, etc.
    In terms of Levelt's 1989 model, it is as you've
described, Martha,("intentional drives Lemma
selection"), in his words: "a preverbal message is the
first step...initiated by the conception of some
communication intention"(107). This is followed by
"formulation processes [which are] lexically-driven"
(181). Assuming post-syntactic Vocabulary Insertion
with a Syntax carried out using abstract
morpho-syntactic features, would (does) DM advocate
selection of Open-Classes, i.e., Roots to "mediate
grammatical encoding" (1989:181) as advocated by
Levelt, given a properly formulated mechanism, ?
    Also, in your previous responses, you've given
several examples which raise the crucial issue of
whether Paninian Principles might not be applicable to
Root selection. This is something I would like to hear
much more about, but for the mean time, I'm not
arguing that early *insertion* is preferable to late
insertion, but that early *selection* might be
preferable late selection. The idea that late
selection might lead to over-generation was suggested
to me by something you wrote in a previous message:
  "any root Vocabulary item can be inserted into any
root node, and if the result makes sense to the
conceptual system, it converges; otherwise, it
crashes. So 'I arrived the plane' is no good because
the Encyclopedic content of 'arrive' is incompatible
with a transitive structure".
    This, for me, indicates that an inordinate number
of crashes may occur before a convergence.
    Let me reiterate my thanks for your patience in
answering my questions (and for letting me take up a
lot of time). Cheers,---Mark V., Stony Brook

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