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Structural implications of late insertion

Svenonius, P. (2026). In The Cambridge Handbook of the Minimalist Program (pp. 518–536). Cambridge University Press

Chapter 27 of the Cambridge handbook argues from outward-sensitive phonologically conditioned suppletive allomorphy to the timing of Vocabulary Insertion. Fulfulde incompletive aspect is -Vt before a vowel-initial exponent, the copy vowel matching the following vowel, and -ay elsewhere (13), so the incompletive's allomorph depends on the exponent chosen for the subject suffix outside it. Insertion from the inside out has not made that choice yet — the outer morpheme is still bare and shows its features only (ComplexHead.visible_of_exp_none) — so it realizes (13b) as *ndur-ay-on-ɗi. If root and affixes are instead spelled out simultaneously, the pattern is stateable: IsJointSpellout asks every morpheme's exponent to win the Subset Principle in the context of the fully realized word, the attested (13a) and (13b) are such fixed points, and the word inside-out insertion builds is not. Limbu shows the same pattern at the root (fn. 7): nuːks- before the vowel-initial nonsingular -i, nuːŋ- elsewhere, with the unalternating hiŋ- 'live' as the control.

Implementation notes

IsJointSpellout is the chapter's simultaneous spell-out, stated over the realized word's morphemes in hierarchical order: the context at each position is ComplexHead.contextAt under hierarchical locality, except that the other exponents are present. It stays study-local until a second study consumes it.
The copy vowel of -Vt is written into the exponent .ot, -on being the only vowel-initial suffix in (13); vowel-initiality is the morphophonological feature vInit that Exp.phon exposes to insertion elsewhere in the word.
Root allomorphy puts the root in the same morpheme list as the affixes, which inside-out insertion cannot do: a ComplexHead's root exponent is present from the start.