morphosyntactic feature geometries

[Martha McGinnis]

Thanks, Heidi!  This helps a lot.

>But I *also* thought that they were competing to realize a fully-specified
>geometry under a node provided by the syntax...
>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.

OK, I've given this some more thought, and I think there may indeed
be a way to get disjunctive interpretations without negative feature
values.  Suppose that all languages have a [Speaker, Addressee]
category syntactically, though only some have an [Addressee] feature
morphologically.  If so, we can safely make the simplifying
assumption that the [Speaker] (only) syntactic category *always*
means "first person exclusive" (i.e. the meaning of the syntactic
node is rigid, not determined relative to other syntactic nodes). If
there's no specific [Speaker, Addressee] vocab item, a [Speaker] item
-- e.g. English "we" -- can be inserted EITHER into a [Speaker] node,
OR into a [Speaker, Addressee] node.  Does that make sense?

>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.

Thanks very much for the reference!  I'd been meaning to read that paper...

>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.

Just to clarify: a subtree is a constituent, and a subgraph is...?  A
component of the tree connected by branches?  So for H&R,
[Participant, Addressee] would be a subtree, [Participant, Addressee,
Individuation, Group]  would be a subgraph, and [Participant,
Addressee, Class, Animate] would be neither?

Cheers,
Martha
--
mcginnis at ucalgary.ca