Editing Distributed morphology (section)

===Exponent list: vocabulary items===
Vocabulary items associate phonological content with arrays of underspecified syntactic and/or semantic features – the features listed in the Lexicon – and they are the closest notion to the traditional morpheme known from generative grammar.<ref name = McGinnis>McGinnis, Martha. (to appear). Distributed Morphology. In Hippisley, Andrew & Gregory T. Stump (eds.) ''The Cambridge Handbook of Morphology''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.</ref> Postsyntactic Morphology posits that this operation takes place after the syntax itself has occurred.

Vocabulary items are also known as the Exponent List. In Distributed Morphology, after the syntax of a given utterance is complete, the Exponent List must be consulted to provide phonological content. This is known as 'exponing' an item.<ref name=":1">Nevins, Andrew "Lectures on Postsyntactic Morphology," ling.auf.net</ref> In other words, a vocabulary item is a relation between a phonological string (which could also be zero or null) and the context in which this string may be inserted.<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~rnoyer/dm/ |title=Distributed Morphology FAQ |access-date=2009-03-15 |archive-date=2015-07-16 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150716033658/http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~rnoyer/dm/ |url-status=dead }}</ref> Vocabulary items compete for insertion to syntactic nodes at spell-out, i.e. after syntactic operations are complete. The following is an example of a vocabulary item in Distributed Morphology:

An affix in Russian can be exponed as follows:

/n/  <-->  [___, +participant +speaker, plural]<ref name = Halle>Halle, Morris. 1997.  'Distributed morphology: Impoverishment and fission.'  In MITWPL 30: Papers at the Interface, ed. Benjamin Bruening, Yoonjung Kang and Martha McGinnis.  MITWPL, Cambridge, 425-449.</ref> 
 
The phonological string on the left side is available for insertion to a node with the features described on the right side.

Roots, i.e. formatives from the Formative List, are exponed based on their features. For example, the first-person singular pronominal paradigm in English is exponed as follows:

[+1 +sing +nom +prn] ←→ /aj/
[+1 +sing +prn] ←→ /mi/

The use of /mi/ does not seem infelicitous in a nominative context at first glance. If /mi/ acquired nominative case in the syntax, it would seem appropriate to use it. However, /aj/ is specified for the feature [+nom], and therefore must block the use of /mi/ in a nominative context. This is known as the Maximal Subset Condition or the Elsewhere Principle: if two items have a similar set of features, the one that is more specific will win. Illustrated in logical notation:

f(E1) ⊂ f(T), f(E2) ⊂ f(T), and f(E1) ⊂ f(E2) → f(E2) wins.<ref>Andrew Nevins, "Lectures on Postsyntactic Morphology"</ref>

In this case, both /mi/ and /aj/ have a subset of features f(T), but /aj/ has the maximal subset.