Abstract
Radical Underspecification theories omit from underlying representations the specification of redundant feature values as well as one member of each contrastive pair of feature values. These theories also crucially employ structure building rules, delinking rules, and constraints on representations. This paper attempts to identify the empirical substance that these formal devices aim to express, and thereby to evaluate the claims of Radical Underspecification. The basic insights of Radical Underspecification theories are the preservation of distributional regularities in patterns of alternation, and the asymmetric status of feature values in distribution and alternation. A careful examination reveals that the formalism of Radical Underspecification is neither successful nor necessary in expressing these insights.
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I am grateful to David Ingram, Michael Kenstowicz, Tara Mohanan, Carol Paradis, Douglas Pulleyblank, Joseph Stemberger, and the reviewers of NLLT for extensive and valuable comments and criticisms on earlier versions of this paper which have resulted in considerable improvement in both content and exposition. I have also benefitted from discussions with Lubna Alsagoff, Diana Archangeli, Jared Bernstein, Young Mee Cho, Larry Hyman, Paul Kiparsky, Will Leben, John McCarthy, and Bill Poser.
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Mohanan, K.P. On the bases of radical underspecification. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 9, 285–325 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00134678
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00134678