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

[Martha McGinnis]

Thanks for the already very helpful info, I'll read that paper of
Jonathan's.

But meanwhile I perhaps should have given Roland's entire result, to make
the nature of the problem clearer.

Noun substitution errors can be of two kinds: either you slip to a
semantically-related noun or to a phonologically similar noun. The finding
is that if you slip to something semantically related, gender inflection on
D, A etc. *does* get adjusted to match it, whereas if you slip to a
phonologically similar noun, gender does *not* get adjusted. The intuition,
which he works out, is that meaning-based word selection (hence confusion)
happens 'early' but form expression (hence confusion) happens 'late', and
somewhere between the two is when gender features propagate from the head N
to the rest of the DP.

He already has to propose a change to the DM architecture to make this work
(namely to carry pointers to roots through the whole derivation, i.e. as
part of the numeration), and I'm playing with whether we can do without that
change, if we can monkey with the timing of the copying of gender features
at MS (which he was assuming we can't, following the edict that I referred
to in my first message). The intuition would be that the 'early' slips
happen at the point of choosing among vocabulary items, after which gender
feature propagation happens 'as normal' according to Jonathan's treatment,
as I now understand it. The late slips happen after selection of vocab
items, in the course of actually phonologically realizing the root, i.e.
it's a slip from one string of phonemes to a nearby similar string of
phonemes (very crudely speaking). This ph. realization happens after all the
feature stuff, including gender feature copying.

Does anyone see big problems in principle with this alternative approach?

thanks,
     Carson