Feature (non-)insertion in a minimalist approach to spellout

1 Abstract Most current theories of inflection violate basic minimalist principles by assuming the doubling of structure-building operations in the lexicon or a big variety of morphological rules and constraints (e.g. Halle and Marantz, 1993). In this paper, I propose an approach to morphological spellout which is restricted to the application of a single generalized transformation which deletes morphosyntactic features and inserts phonological features specified lexically in vocabulary items. Based on data from Georgian, I show that this approach allows to account for Elsewhere effects and feature neutralization. I argue that Nimboran data provided by Harbour (2000) as evidence against a minimalist approach to spellout are consistent with this model if syntactic features are represented in a feature-geometric model as in Harley and Ritter (2002).