27.4414, Books: Impossible Persons: Harbour
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LINGUIST List: Vol-27-4414. Mon Oct 31 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.
Subject: 27.4414, Books: Impossible Persons: Harbour
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Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2016 13:44:12
From: David Weininger [dgw at mit.edu]
Subject: Impossible Persons: Harbour
Title: Impossible Persons
Series Title: Linguistic Inquiry Monographs
Publication Year: 2016
Publisher: MIT Press
http://mitpress.mit.edu/
Book URL: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/impossible-persons
Author: Daniel Harbour
Hardback: ISBN: 9780262034739 Pages: 330 Price: U.S. $ 95
Paperback: ISBN: 9780262529297 Pages: 330 Price: U.S. $ 37
Abstract:
Impossible Persons, Daniel Harbour’s comprehensive and groundbreaking formal
theory of grammatical person, upends understanding of a universal and
ubiquitous grammatical category. Breaking with much past work, Harbour
establishes three core theses, one empirical, one theoretical, and one
metatheoretical. Together, these redefine the data subsumed under the rubric
of “person,” simplify the feature inventory that a theory of person must
posit, and restructure the metatheory in which feature theory as a whole
resides.
At its heart, Impossible Persons poses a simple question of the possible
versus the actual: in how many ways could languages configure their person
systems, in how many do they configure them, and what explains the size and
shape of the shortfall? Harbour’s empirical thesis—that the primary object of
study for persons are partitions, not syncretisms—transforms a sea of data
into a categorical problem of the attested and the absent. Positing,
innovatively, that features denote actions, not predicates, he shows that two
features alone generate all and only the attested systems. This apparently
poor inventory yields rich explanatory dividends, covering the morphological
composition of person, its interaction with number, its connection to space,
and properties of its semantics and linearization. Moreover, the core
properties of this approach are shared with Harbour’s earlier work on number
features. Jointly, these results establish an important metatheoretical
corollary concerning the balance between richness of feature semantics and
restrictiveness of feature inventories. This corollary holds deep implications
for how linguists should approach feature theory in future.
Linguistic Field(s): Syntax
Written In: English (eng)
See this book announcement on our website:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=108193
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