535 Assignment 15

Pfau, pp. 171-233

Due: Thurs, March 11

1. What head does Pfau assume is related to adjectives in the same way that [+D] is related to nouns in Harley&Noyer’s system?

2. What English example does Pfau give that illustrates person, number and gender features switching places while Case features remain in place?

3. Pfau presents a view of accommodation-producing speech errors according to which the accommodation is not created by implementing some sort of ‘repair strategy’ that tries to compensate for an error, but rather is the natural outcome of vocabulary insertion after the error has taken place. He only gives one type of case where a compensating ‘repair strategy’ is needed applied to account for the output of an error. What example(s) illustrate this process? At what stage does the repair strategy apply? What does the repair strategy do?

4. (bonus analysis question, answer not in Pfau. don’t have to do it if you don’t want). In class, we have seen two kinds of proposals concerning the stem vowel change in cases like sleep/slep-t.

i) Readjustment rules are morphophonological rules that apply to stems after vocabulary insertion has taken place (the way Halle and Marantz see things)
ii) the sleep/slep alternation is a case of allomorphy: /slep/ is a stem inserted to realize √SLEEP in the context of [+past]

Taking Pfau’s proposal that DM can be a production model seriously, these two ways of treating stem alternations make different predictions about whether stem alternation accomodation should be seen in ‘form-based’ errors. Why?

In particular, under the (i) scenario, one might find a case of an error where a conditioned suffix allomorphy (e.g. some allomorph of [+past]) did/did not show accommodation at the same time as a stem alternation triggered by the same environment did/did not show accomodation. (Pick the appropriate ‘did’ or ‘did not’ in each sentence). This would not be possible under the (ii) scenario.