Residue of Subset Principle

Sasson Margaliot sasson at LIVE.COM
Sun Nov 8 13:24:02 UTC 2009


OK, the only Vocabulary Items allowed to participate in "competition" are 
the ones whose features are a "subset" of the features of the morpheme. And
"the item matching the greatest number of features" is the winner.

But what happens is there are two "winners" matching the SAME number of
features?

Say, we have two features: "IncludingSpeaker" and "ParticipantsOnly"

1st person   <->    [ +IncludingSpeaker ]
2nd person  <->    [ +ParticipantsOnly  ]
3rd person   <->    [  ]  otherwise  

If a morpheme has, for example,  

[ +IncludingSpeaker +ParticipantsOnly +dual ]    
( Russian "my-s-toboi" = "you-and-I" )

then there is no clear winner - there are two winners !  Just an Example.

Natural solution would be some kind of Hierarchy of Features 

              IncludingSpeaker > ParticipantsOnly

The idea of such an Hierarchy is briefly mentioned in literature from time
to time, but is there some kind of consensus forming about this issue? 
Alternatively, is there evidence AGAINST Hierarchy of Features?

Also, if present, would such Hierarchy be universal or language specific? 



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