morphosyntactic feature geometries

[Heidi Harley]

Hi all!

Been reading the discussion with great interest. Funnily enough I'd just
been thinking of posting about a separate (but related) issue, but
thought I'd get a couple of cents' worth in on this first.

While Betsy and I didn't take any stand on the status of the geometries
in any particular framework, I have a few guesses about how they fit
in, but which I don't really have any justification for; armchair
thoughts, for the most part. But I thought I'd throw 'em out anyway.

Back in 1994 when I was first thinking about these questions, I assumed
that VIs had to realize subgraphs of the geometry, as Rolf suggests,
and were hence so specified, each with a particular subgraph. But I
*also* thought that they were competing to realize a fully-specified
geometry under a node provided by the syntax. In a footnote somewhere
in H&R, the possibility that the independent features are assembled
into the geometric shape by syntactic operations is mentioned. I still
think this might well be right, given that there seems to be some
degree of syntactic separation possible (NumP, etc.).

W/r to the subgraph/subtree contrast mentioned by Rolf, if Arabic 't-'
does realize just 2, it could do so by being specified for the H&R
subtree headed by Hearer (since Arabic has the incl/excl distinction,
Hearer is active there). Hearer doesn't dominate number, so there's no
entailment relationship between 2 and number. But without negative
features, and without a Hearer subtree, in 1994 I had to go for
homophonic t- prefixes (I think your analysis did that too, though,
right, Rolf?), while Halle's Impoverishment and Fission paper, with
liberal deployment of negative feature values, manages not to do this.

As for negative feature values, in 1994 I was dead agin' 'em; was
thinking about the geometry in Avery & Rice terms. I *think* that betsy
and I were also thinking that default interpretations arose at
semantics, but that negative values in the syntax weren't possible.
I'll have to go back & reconstruct the reasoning. But I am very
interested to  think about the various predictions!

Finally, as for the specific problem of the semantic entailments of
number, I highly recommend a short paper of Elizabeth Cowper's (think
it's  available on her website) about plural and dual. It contains a
highly original suggestion about the interpretation of number features
as 'greater-than', such that the feature-geometric representation of
'dual' and that of plural in a language without dual are the same: >2.
Languages with 'dual' have a third dependent of the number feature, >3.
Her theory makes different predictions about the possible
interpretations of the features than ours does, and about the relative
markedness of dual in a system that contains it, and hence also about
possible syncretisms, which I actually suspect may be right.

I really look forward to hearing about how the various predictions turn
out!

next posting in just a second,

:) hh


Heidi Harley
Department of Linguistics
University of Arizona
(520)626-3554
http://linguistics.arizona.edu/~hharley/
hharley at email.arizona.edu