Dan Everett: ROOT in DM (reply to Mark Volpe)

[Martha McGinnis]

Folks,

Mark Volpe's posting was interesting. I can see his point, but there could
be evidence for ROOT which he, if I understand correctly, overlooks.

Consider eat/feed, die/kill, and so on. The elimination of ROOT for these
pairs would seem to be based on the assumption that all the differences
between them are captured by the syntactic structures that derive them.
But if there were other meaning/usage distinctions that did not involve,
say, CAUSE, but instead were cultural, idiomatic, etc, then these would
arguably emerge from different ROOTs.

Related to this is the question as to whether languages with overt
causative morphology distinguish three-way contrasts such as CAUSE+die vs.
die vs. (a separate word) 'kill', and so forth.

This would mean that individual members of derivational pairs might
possess nonderivational and non-eliminable residues. ROOT is ideal for
capturing these distinctions.

Dan



**************************************************************

Daniel L. Everett
Professor of Phonetics and Phonology
University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester, UK
M13 9PL
dan.everett at man.ac.uk
Office Phone: 44-161-275-3158
Department Phone & Fax: 44-161-275-3187