Northeast Corridor Morphology

 HI Jim, Good questions! On (1), one needs to think through the relationship between selection and allosemy.  In my 2013 paper, I wanted it to be the case that, in your example, ORGAN would need to be interpreted in the context of IZE before ATION was considered, although it could be ATION that sent ORGAN-IZE off for interpretation,  What you're correctly saying is that, in the "Innocuous piece," I haven't worked through the implications of my phase-al identifications made from the point of view of phonological selection and the phase by phase semantic interpretation that would need to parallel phase by phase phonological interpretation.  I will try to spend a few minutes thinking this through and get back to you. On (2), yes, this is a good question -- are root-root Mergers unexceptional?  For the specific example you give, it's not clear to me whether the bracketing [ [ [ CURI OUS ] a ] ity ] and the bracketing [ [  CURI [ OUS a] ] ity ] are distinct...

To test out this system, I am pasting here the message that I sent to Alec that he alluded to in his document prior to the most recent meeting: Hi Alec, Cc'ing Neil here just because we were talking about some of this separately. I had a few issues that I was thinking about in response to your innocuous paper. I was sort of looking for a way to bring this up in the meeting, but the very interesting conversation went in a different direction and I wanted to see where that would go, rather than hijacking it with things that I haven't really worked out myself. I'll keep them short... (1) Are we ok with lots of semantically “meaningless” roots? So e.g. [v √ORGAN [v √IZE v]] + [n √ATION n ] could have a Ø interpretation for v and √IZE. This kind of question comes up in my analysis of -væða verbs in chapter 6 of my nominalizations book, although I stopped short of giving a definitive general answer. (I just said that one way or another, -væða verbs cannot have semantically Ø v....