morphosyntactic feature geometries

[Rolf Noyer]

Hi Martha et. al,

Strangely coincidental: I too was looking through and thinking a bit about Harley & Ritter's paper in Language just yesterday afternoon.

When I wrote my dissertation I concluded that there were no such geometries, although I toyed with them quite a bit. I have not, but would like to get a chance to, think carefully about H&R's arguments and decide if I wish to recant or put up a fight.

I too am a bit confused about the place such representations would occupy in the grammar. Sets of morphosyntactic features might be geometrically related in a syntactic node for which vocabulary items compete, or they might be geometrically related in vocabulary items which compete for insertion into those nodes.

If the latter, we might expect that person and gender could not be encoded in a single vocabulary item without gender.  In other words, we should never expect, for example,

[2 pl f]

to split into two pieces:  [2 f] and [pl].  More generally, we should, I believe, expect that any given vocabulary item should encode a subgraph of the entire graph (= tree) of features. Notice that this doesn't mean "subtree" since, as I pointed out, if this were so one could not have a vocabulary item expressing [2] without also expressing gender and number at the same time, clearly a false prediction in many languages, as for example Arabic in which

t-aktub-na

spells out [2 pl f], with /t-/ as [2] and /-na/ as [pl f]

If the former, we might expect certain agreement phenomena, which presumably examine the syntactic nodes themselves and not the vocabulary items which are inserted, to be subject to constraints which would find explanation in a geometry of the features involved.

Martha says:

So how does a given grammar
determine the relation between representations and interpretations?
It seems as though the answer is this: it uses the most specific
morphosyntactic category compatible with the intended meaning.

When I last thought about this my attitude was that one should view the matter of interpretation (just like everywhere else) as combining semantic entailments with functional inferences. The idea that plurals in a language with duals mean "three or more" does not strike me as being the result of a specifically interpreted "minus dual" value of some sort, but rather a blocking effect. If the speaker had meant two (s)he would have used a dual; thus using the plural implies three or more. As a pragmatic or functional inference however, one might expect this to be cancellable in the appropriate discourse context. Here my knowledge of the phenomenon ends; it would be helpful to find out if plurals can be used to refer to two individuals in a language with a dual category if the discourse context is suitably constructed, such as, for example, a situation in which all that was discourse-relevant was that the argument in question was not individual, but at least two.

Since I am committed (as I think many of us are) to a semantics which interprets the syntax rather than generates it, I don't understand what it means to say "it uses the most specific morphosyntactic category compatible with the intended meaning" except as a kind of pragmatic rule of the Gricean sort "be as informative as possible".  I'm not an expert on this literature but I seem to recall that Larry Horn has worked on this problem for number and certain quantifiers. So for example, asserting "three men are in the room" seems to strongly imply that "no more than three men are in the room" but it does not entail it.

Obviously these remarks are really off the cuff but maybe we can get some dialogue going.

Best regards,

Rolf