Heidi Harley: gender copying and vocabulary insertion (reply to Carson Schutze)

[Martha McGinnis]

Hi all --

this is a v. interesting question, which in general i think has a
straightforward answer, but in this specific is tricky.
Straightforwardly, if Vocab Insertion discharges features
by *replacing* them, then feature copying, fusion, etc,
will not be prohibited but just impossible. The intuition would
be that the point of Vocab Insertion is to rewrite bundles
of morphosyntactic features as peices of phonology. Perhaps
feature copying could happen after vocab insertion has begun,
assuming VI applies bottom-up successive-cyclically, but it
would only apply to and from nodes that have not yet been
discharged -- effectively it could only apply to nodes that
hadn't been involved in VI yet.

On the other hand, though, if Jonathan B. is right (see 1999
Maryland Morphology Mayfest paper on Itel'men), things are
a bit trickier particularly with respect to gender/class features:
according to him, such features are fundamentally different
from other morphosyntactic features. Because they belong to
particular roots, he argues they must be, in effect, 'phonological',
and do not exist before Vocab Insertion. If that's so,
sensitivity to such features, copying 'em and so forth, can
ONLY happen *after* VI. (He argues that these are the
only cases of countercyclic feature sensitivity, i.e. 'inwards'
feature sensitivity, and that this type of sensitivity is
explained if class/gender features are phonological.) But
seems like that's incompatible with Roland's nifty-sounding
explanation for gender mismatches after mistakes in
VI.

If Jonathan's wrong, though, and all features are truly
morphosyntactic, including gender&class, and if VI does
discharge features by replacing 'em, then we can understand
why feature copying isn't possible after VI has begun.
I think.

:) hh

---------------------------------------------------------------------
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