morphosyntactic feature geometries

[Martha McGinnis]

My my, how time does fly.  I'm FINALLY responding to Susana Bejar's
posting of Feb. 29.

>if an agr-head has a [group] probe then the search for a goal can
>only be halted by an element in its domain that is itself specified
>for some feature that entails [group]. In a language with a
>plural/dual contrast, this means that both plural and dual NPs in
>the domain of the probe will Match and halt it.

This is very interesting.  Can you send me your thesis?  Or can I
download it from your website?

>(Note that I'm assuming a particular view of the relation
>between [group] and [minimal], namely that [minimal] is a dependent of
>[group], i.e.  [minimal] entails [group]. This is a controversial
>assumption, but see the Cowper paper mentioned by Heidi for good arguments
>in support of this).

This is also very interesting.  I've come to a very similar (though
not identical) conclusion about Person features -- Addressee entails
Speaker, though perhaps in a different way.  OK, I REALLY have to
read that Cowper paper!

>In principle, I don't think having negative features precludes having
>geometric relations between features. So if we did have negative values
>in syntax, we could still have a (non-privative) feature geometry. The
>negative values would simply be another way of node labelling:
>
>(4)	+Individ
>         /       \
>     +group      (-group)
>     /   \
>  +min   (-min)

Not in principle, but perhaps in practice.  For Person features, it
seems that both [+Speaker] and [-Speaker] would need to be specified
as [+/- Addressee].  This suggests an unstructured feature bundle.

>This does, however, preclude logical underspecification, so the question
>is whether or not this is a desirable outcome.

What do you mean by "logical"?  It would in principle be possible to
have three options: [+X], [-X], and [unspecified for X] -- Halle &
Marantz argue this is the case for the [obviative] feature in
Potawatomi.

>we wouldn't expect the existence of languages where
>plural and dual NPs can match a probe, but singular NPs cannot, since the
>singular NPs would be specified as [-group] and therefore should
>technically be able to match a probe for [group].

It could look for the feature [+group].  Of course, this would
predict that a head could also look for [-group]. Does this not
happen?

>In her last posting, Martha considers this question with respect to the
>example of a conjoined subject like "Rolf and Martha". If I understand
>correctly, I think Martha's suggestion is that If a verb in this context
>needs to be marked as dual, not plural, then we need to assume negative
>features in th syntax.
>
>plural morphology <-> [+group, -minimal]
>dual morphology <-> [+group, +minimal]
>
>The implication, I think, is that without the possibility of a [-minimal]
>specification, nothing will prevent the incorrect use of a plural marker
>rather than a dual marker. I'm not sure I understand why this is a
>necessary conclusion. Couldn't we just assume that vocabulary competition
>ensures the correct outcome?

Yes, indeed we could.  That wasn't quite my concern.  I was wondering
whether a subject that's semantically dual ("Rolf and Martha") can be
associated with a plural number representation in the *syntax* (not
just with the plural morphology).  If it can't, why not?  The answer
to this is straightforward if the plural representation is [+group,
-minimal].  It's not as straightforward if the plural is just
[group].  Duals are groups -- in fact, in English, sets of two are
plural.  So what would block using plural number for a group of two
in a language that has a dual?  Rolf suggested that this could be
handled by Gricean implicature: the dual is more specific, so is used
if duality is intended; if the plural is used, we infer that the
subject is not dual, or perhaps that its duality is irrelevant.
Alana's remark that duals *can* be syntactically plural supports this
view: it's not an all-or-nothing matter.

I'm not sure how this carries over to person, though.  In a language
with an inclusive first person, can people ever use the exclusive
plural to refer to inclusive-we?  If you can use the plural to refer
to a group of two, this should be possible too... but I suspect it
isn't.  If not, why not?  Is exclusive plural syntactically
[-addressee]?

Best,
Martha
--
mcginnis at ucalgary.ca