Indeterminacy, complex features and underspecification

Abstract

At its simplest, morphosyntactic agreement may be viewed as involving linguistic objects which have the same values for a given feature. In contemporary constraint-based formalisms the relationship is usually modelled by structure sharing in the syntax; for predicate-argument agreement, most often it is assumed that the target and the controller provide compatible (complete or partial) specifications of features of the controller. This approach has much to recommend it, being based on the straightforward mechanism of combining information monotonically in the syntax. Additionally, it is often (but not invariably) assumed that (a subset of) these same morphosyntactic features are simply passed down to the morphology for spell out (Bresnan, In: Baltin and Collins (eds.) Handbook of contemporary syntactic theory, 2000; Lexical functional syntax, 2001) (but see e.g. Ackerman and for approaches in LFG and other constraint-based formalisms which allow some further separation between these components). We discuss a range of cases of morphosyntactic agreement which are challenging in one way or another to this lean approach and explore how they may be modelled without adding any extra machinery, by using underspecified feature representations in the syntax, within one such framework, that of Lexical Functional Grammar LFG.

Frankenduals: Their typology, structure, and significance

“…Frankenduals-as I will term these duals stitched together from morphemes also used for singular and plural-have long been appreciated across a range of frameworks (e.g., Voegelin & Voegelin 1957, Jeanne 1978, Noyer 1992, Hale 1997, Plank 1997, Corbett 2000, Harley & Ritter 2002, Adger 2003, Cowper 2005, Nevins 2011, Sadler 2011, Arka 2012a, Dalrymple 2012, Harbour 2014. The main conclusion that theoreticians have drawn from the phenomenon is that dual is not a semantic primitive (Jeanne 1978:74).…”