Prevailing approaches do not have a computational lexicon

[Carl Pollard]

Hi Andrew,

Hope you don't mind another naive question. I know you said it is a
maytter of some debate, but in your own view, how does feature checking
happen while the structure is being built, pre-morphology, if the
features are still underspecified?

Thanks,

Carl

>
Hi Carl,

Yes, the debate is roughly as you've characterized it. "Classical" MP
(if I may use the term "classical" loosly) holds that lexical items come
fully formed into the syntax, complete with feature structures (albeit not
ones as rigourously defined as those in HPSG). The words are then combined
via merge, into phrase markers, where all the relevant features are
"checked" (very roughly equivalent to unified -- which is why some of us
lurk on these lists). The alternative view (a la Distributed morphology)
is that major class lexical items such as verbs and nouns come into the
syntax partly underspecified (including underspecification for syntactic
category). For example, a root such as "DIE" comes in only partly
specified, it is by virtue of combining it with functional categories such
as v (a verbalizer), aspect, tense, etc. it becomes either the verb die or
the noun death. The actual lexical item (technically vocabulary item) is
inserted at the end of the derivation. There is a fair amount of debate
about such things as the role of various semantic primitives (such as
"Cause" and "become" and the extent to which these are present in the
grammar. How checking works in this structure building system is also a
matter of some debate.
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