morphosyntactic feature geometries

[Daniel L. Everett]

>   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]?
>



This is an interesting issue. In their new book on agreement, Wechsler
& Zlatic (2003, The many faces of agreement, CSLI) address some
correspondences between semantics and morphology. Not specifically what
Martha asks about, but an interesting discussion of the issues in any
case. Their distinction between INDEX (semantic-based agreement) and
CONCORD (morphological feature-based agreement - actually
morphosyntactic features in their system) seems quite useful and could
be relevant here as well. One would, ceteris paribus, expect number (in
their system number is found in both CONCORD and INDEX) to match
between morphology and semantics. So I wonder if this would predict
different semantic representations for languages with/without 'dual'?
As for the syntax-morphology connection, wouldn't 'unification' predict
that the morphology would either (i) fill in missing values or that
(ii) the syntax nodes unspecified for certain features could allow some
features to play a morphological role, but no syntactic one (i.e. that
feature-matching between syntax and morphology would not be forced if
there is no incompatibility)? Or is (ii) ruled out in DM?

Besides compositional analysis of morphosyntactic nodes, is anyone
looking at agreement from this Harley-Ritter perspective? This would
seem an ideal area to look for answers to Martha's queries.


-- Dan

------------------------------------------

Daniel L. Everett
Professor of Phonetics & Phonology
Postgraduate Programme Director
Department of Linguistics
The University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester, UK M13 9PL
http://ling.man.ac.uk/info/staff/de
Fax: 44-161-275-3187
Office: 44-161-275-3158