morphosyntactic feature geometries

[Martha McGinnis]

Dear DM-Listers,

[Please forgive re-posting: it seems some mailservers are filtering
out messages with "hello" in the title.]

Whoa, has this list been quiet!  I guess everyone is too busy doing
research to post queries.  I'd like to take this opportunity to
encourage you to update your fellow listers on what you've been
working on, morphologically speaking.  Don't be shy!  I know some of
you have been writing busily away.  Also, please take a moment to
raise any questions you might have.  Here's my contribution...

I've recently been working on morphosyntactic feature geometries, a
la Harley & Ritter (see their 2002 Language paper).  This work has
got me thinking about where morphosyntactic feature geometries should
fit into the grammar.  H&R don't focus on this, because they want to
be as theory-neutral as possible.  But once you start to think of it,
it's not completely obvious.

Let's begin with the observation that morphosyntactic feature
geometries can be somewhat unspecified.  For example, a language with
a special "dual" number category would have a special featural
representation (with both [Minimal] and [Group] specified), while the
plural number category would have only [Group] specified.  On the
other hand, a language without a special dual category would also
represent dual number as just [Group].  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.  If
there's a [Minimal]+[Group] category, it uses that for the dual; if
not, it uses just [Group].  On the other hand, if the meaning is
plural, [Minimal] can't be used, so only [Group] is.

Now, this sounds a lot like Vocabulary competition in DM, which
inserts the most specific Vocabulary item compatible with the fully
specified syntactic/semantic features of the syntactic node (which in
turn determine the meaning).  Suppose then that H&R's privative
feature geometries are morphosyntactic representations of Vocabulary
items.  This is more or less Bonet's approach, if I understand it
correctly.  If so, then how are the features of *syntactic nodes*
represented? (Bonet's dissertation leaves this issue somewhat open.)
For example, how do we know that the plural representation can't be
used to represent the dual meaning in a language that has a special
dual category?  Does the syntactic node have a binary-featured
representation, like [+Group, -Minimal]?  If not, then what?  Does
the semantics fill in default feature values like [-Minimal]?

I'm sure some of you have thought this through much more carefully
than I've been able to, as yet.  Please let me know what you think.
References welcome!

All the best,
Martha