Issues of Affix Hopping in an Attract-F Framework
Paul Hagstrom, MIT
December 1994

This isn't really an abstract so much as comments about the contents
of the abovenamed paper.  The main focus of discussion is Howard
Lasnik's 1994 paper "Verbal Morphology: Syntactic Structures meets
the Minimalist Program," which to my knowledge has not yet been
published anywhere.  Re-reading my paper after almost a year, I see
that it is almost vital to be familiar with Lasnik's paper, as the
text of my own paper is quite densely packed.

It is also worth noting that the "Attract-F" context in which the
discussion is placed is basically that outlined in _Bare Phrase
Structure_ as it was presented in Chomsky's Fall lectures.  Several
of these concepts were subsequently revised in Chapter 4 of
_The Minimalist Program_, and so there are parts of the analysis
in my paper which rely on portions of the BPS theory since
abandoned (such as having movement be driven by features on the
thing which moves, rather than by features on the head which is
attracting it).

The main proposals I put forth concern an interpretation of
ellipsis in English sentences where the tense is "mismatched"
between the overt and elided material (1), and a refinement of
the "affixal vs. featural INFL" proposal suggested in Lasnik (1994).

(1)	John slept and Mary will (sleep) too

Specifically, I suggested that ellipsis of this sort is concerned 
with interpretable features, and that tense features are present
and uninterpretable on inflected verbs (causing V->I movement),
while uninflected verbs can remain in situ.  Following Lasnik, the
verbs which are considered to be "uninflected" are all verbs in
English except have and be.  Where INFL is separated from the
verb in the surface ordering, it is "pronounced as 'do'".