Rolf Noyer: Application of DM to error analyses (reply to Amanda Owen)

[Martha McGinnis]

Amanda,

In addition to what Carson said, you might want to take a look at some of
the following papers:

Halle, Morris. 1992.  'Latvian Declension.'  Morphology Yearbook 1991, ed.
Geert Booij and Jaap van der Marle.  Kluwer, Dordrecht, 33-47.

Halle, Morris. 1995.  'The Russian Declension.'  In Perspectives in
Phonology, ed. Jennifer Cole and Charles Kisseberth.  CSLI, Stanford, pp.
321-353.

Halle, Morris. 1997.  'Distributed morphology: Impoverishment and fission.'
In MITWPL 30: Papers at the Interface, ed. Benjamin Bruening,
Yoonjung Kang and Martha McGinnis.  MITWPL, Cambridge, 425-449.

Noyer, Rolf. 1998.  'Impoverishment theory and morphosyntactic markedness.'
In Morphology and its relation to phonology and syntax, ed.
Steve Lapointe, Diane K. Brentari, and Patrick Farrell.  CSLI, Stanford,
264-285.

Harris, James. 1997a.  'Why n'ho is pronounced [li] in Barceloni Catalan.'
In MITWPL 30: Papers at the Interface, ed. Benjamin Bruening,
Yoonjung Kang and Martha McGinnis.  MITWPL, Cambridge, 451-479.

...for some discussion of default rules in DM.  There are several ways in
which forms which are "unmarked" can show up.  They are:

(1) The form is a default spell-out within the system of spell-out rules.
Therefore, in the absence of any features, this form is inserted.

(2) The morphological features which trigger the spell-out of the form are
themselves defaults/"unmarked".  So for, say, Spanish, according to Jim
Harris, a default rules supplies to unmarked masculine nouns the
declensional class I (or the equivalent) which ends up meaning that they
receive the word marker /-o/.  Nouns may be masculine and not have the word
marker /-o/ -- these must be specified as some other class, and this
specification overrides the default class assignment rule.  Likewise, nouns
do not have to have their class feature supplied by the default rule: a
noun such as /man-o/ 'hand' is feminine but specified as class I.

(3) Impoverishment may operate in certain contexts making what would
otherwise be a "marked" form not appear, and allowing instead an "unmarked"
form.  Again, the example for Spanish that Jim Harris proposed involves the
sequence of 3rd person indirect object clitics followed by 3rd person
object clitics.  For the indirect object clitic the expected form is
replaced in this context by an "unmarked" form /s-(e)/.

On the matter of combining various functional projections such as Num, Agr,
and even Gender (not all of which are necessarily functional projections --
and on such an issue DM is silent since the precise inventory of
projections is not crucial to the tenets of the theory), if one assumes
that these are separate in syntax, then each should, by default, be a
morpheme subject to spell-out as an individual affix.  So to anyone wedded
to such an expanded INFL approach the first thing to look for would be
evidence from the morphology that INFL does indeed have a tripartite
(bipartite) structure.  If this proves fruitless there is the possibility
of Fusing functional heads as single morphemes, although on this point
there has been little overall agreement, I think.  This was the approach I
used in my thesis (fusing T and AGR) prior to spell-out in Arabic.  There
you can also find discussion of the Hebrew prefix conjugation; for an
alternative, see Halle 1997, for example.

Rolf Noyer