Mark Volpe: ROOT in DM

[Martha McGinnis]

Hi Listers,
    The term ROOT as I've understood is "what remains
when all morphological information is wrung out of a
form" (Aronoff, 1994: 40). Is this the definition
which is assumed in Marantz (1997)? Based on English
examples, where ROOTs and Stems are isomorphic, it's
not clear what a DM ROOT must be, Moreover, to my
knowledge, I've never seen it defined. This may be a
good thing.
    Based on my research, the strict definition of ROOT
is inadequate to the task. Let me try to provide in
example. In Heidi Harley's wonderful dissertation
(1995a) and in an unpublished paper (1995b) she
develops an elegant system which seems adequate to
handling the Lexical Syntax of the Causative
Alternation in Japanese. The unaccusative is
base-generated under the head of VP with the abstract
morpheme BECOME, the lexical causative is base
generated under the head of vP (Heidi's EventP) under
the abstract morpheme CAUSE.
In these cases you have a bi-unique relation between
BECOME and unaccusative, CAUSE and lexical causative.
    However, important facts about lexical causatives
in Japanese have not been noted in the extant
literature, e.g. Miyagawa (1989) and Kuroda (1993). In
fact, lexical causatives are paired with unergatives,
so that in Japanese you can 'run your friend to the
liquor store', 'play your children in the park',
'sleep your baby in the afternoon', etc. Moreover,
lexical causatives are paired with transitives so that
you get 'look at/ show', 'eat/ feed', 'put on'/dress',
etc. Now the bi-unique relationship between the
alternations and Lexical Syntax has dissolved.
Unergative/ Transitive paired with lexical causative
are both neccessarily base-generated under head of vP
with the abstract morpheme CAUSE. A ROOT under the
strict definition cannot disambiguate one from the
other.
    Has anyone been playing with the "definition" of
ROOT or found need to in their research. My intuition
is that to the extent that it remains categorically
unspecified, it should be a DM ROOT.
    I look forward to any comments.
                         Mark

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Y! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your web site
http://webhosting.yahoo.com/