Julie Legate: gender copying and vocabulary insertion (reply to Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy)

[Martha McGinnis]

Hello,

> When a Vocabulary item is being chosen for
> insertion at a given word-structure node, what morphosyntactic
> information (if any) *not located at that node* can influence the
> choice?  One answer, which uses the metaphor of 'discharge', is:
> 'Only information that has not yet been discharged through
> phonological spell-out'.  Another answer is: 'Only information
> encoded by material already phonologically present in the wordform,
> e.g. by affixes already added'.  DM of course prefers the first
> answer, but the second is implied in Shelly Lieber's approach and
> also, I guess, in Kiparskyan level-ordered morphology.  Both have a
> ring of plausibility about them.  Which is correct?  Or are both in
> some degree correct -- which may suggest that what is really going on
> is something different from either?

I thought a paper of mine in MITWPL 1999 would be relevant to mention (it's
cited by Bobaljik in at least some versions of his Itelmen paper) that
argues for something very much like the "other answer" you gave.
Essentially, when vocabulary insertion operates on a bundle of features the
features can either be (1) spelled out phonologically, (2) fissioned off, or
(3) deleted. In the case of either (1) or (2) the features are still
available for morphological operations. In the case of (3), of course, they
are not.

Now, I must say that the paper was on Irish agreement and pro-drop, a
notoriously controversial topic, so perhaps not the most solid evidence for
this position one would hope for ...

> My article 'Grammatically conditioned allomorphy, paradigmatic
> structure, and the Ancestry Constraint' (Transactions of the
> Philological Society 99 (2001), 223-45) addresses this directly, with
> discussion of Jonathan's Itelmen paper.  I propose a constraint on
> grammatically conditioned allomorphy which, though different from
> Jonathan's, is consistent with the spirit of DM, I think.

I look forward to reading it.

Best,
Julie
------------------------
Julie Anne Legate
MIT Linguistics