Martha McGinnis: Early selection of roots (reply to Mark Volpe)

[Martha McGinnis]

I'll respond again to Mark's posting, but others should
of course feel free to put in their two cents on these
issues as well.

>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.

This seems like a logical possibility, but as far as I
know it's not a route that has been taken so far by
anyone adopting DM assumptions.  As I think I said
in earlier postings, the role of LF and the competition
among roots for insertion seem to be a couple of the
issues at stake, with empirical consequences you
could explore.  It seems to me that even if roots are
only 'selected' early, Vocabulary insertion would work
the same way for roots as it does for non-roots, i.e.,
competition among items specified for certain features
that play a role in the syntax. This is a different
approach to root insertion than the one taken in the
DM literature so far, so I do think the same empirical
issues arise.

Or maybe you have some other ideas about how to test
your hypothesis. Remember that DM is just a framework
of assumptions for hypothesis-testing.  Within this
framework, it's been proposed that roots aren't
distinguished from one another until Vocabulary
insertion takes place, and that all roots compete
with each other for insertion (see Marantz's 1997
PennWPL paper and '"Cat" as a phrasal idiom' ms., and
the Harley & Noyer paper cited in my first posting).
As far as I can see, there's no contradiction between
adopting the assumptions of DM and discovering that
this proposal is wrong.

Regarding overgeneration, see my last posting about
the possibility of (quasi-)continuous interpretation
of grammatical choices. This might block the kind of
overgeneration you describe; it all depends on the
details.  As ever, it seems reasonable to ignore the
issue until someone finds evidence that bears on it.

I'm not sure I've added anything to my earlier
postings, but I hope this helps.

Regards,
Martha


mcginnis at ucalgary.ca