535 Assignment 1

Paper: Harley & Noyer, “Distributed Morphology”

Due: Tuesday, Jan 20th

Describe how the Subset Principle operates to determine the winning candidate in vocabulary insertion (3-4 sentences).

The Subset Principle mandates that the features of a winning candidate in vocabulary insertion must be a subset of the grammatical features specified in the terminal morpheme. The features of the candidate may be a proper subset of the features specified in the terminal morpheme. Or, the set of features of the candidate may be identical to the set of features specified in the terminal morpheme. Importantly, the Vocabulary Item in question may not have some feature that the terminal morpheme does not specify.

When more than one Vocabulary Item is such that its features are a subset of the features specified by the terminal morpheme, the Item that matches the greatest number of features specified in the terminal morpheme wins.

What does the operation of “Merger” do? At what level of application can an instance of ‘Merger’ also be called “Local Dislocation”? (2-3 sentences).

Under the Merger operation, the structural relation that holds between two elements at one level of representation is replaced by a different structural relation at a subsequent level of representation. Merger can be called Local Dislocation if it occurs after Vocabulary Insertion and Linearization. Local Dislocation can only apply to string-adjacent Vocabulary Items. I gather that the concept of string adjacency cannot apply until Linearization has occurred.

Under Local Dislocation, the relationship of ‘adjacency to a following constituent’ is replaced by the relationship of ‘affixation to the linear head of the constituent’.