The Geometry of Interpretable Features: Infl in English and Spanish

Abstract

This article proposes a feature-geometric analysis of the interpretable features of Infl, using MINIMALIST syntax and DISTRIBUTED MORPHOLOGY . A small universal set of monovalent interpretable features and a set of entailment relations among them provide the basis for a principled account of the tense systems of English and Spanish. While each feature, each lexical item, and each vocabulary item has a unified representation, surface polysemy is shown to arise from the mappings between them. Crosslinguistic variation is shown to arise from the different features chosen by each language and from the ways in which each language assembles its features into lexical items and vocabulary items. In addition, the presence or absence of a dependent feature F in a given language is shown to have important consequences for the semantic interpretation of the feature dominating F. These three possible differences interact to produce the significant superficial differences between the tense systems of the two languages.

Morphological variability in second language learners: An examination of electrophysiological and production data.

“…They assume that features are fully specified in the syntax, but not in the morphology (Halle and Marantz, 1993;Harley and Noyer, 1999). In the morphology, singular and masculine are underspecified, whereas plural and feminine are marked (i.e., fully specified) (Bonet, 1995;Cowper, 2005;Harley, 1994;Harley and Ritter, 2002;Harris, 1991). For agreement to be successful, the features on lexical items must be compatible with those of the syntax.…”

Non-Creole Features in the Verb System of Afro-Hispanic Languages: New Insights from SLA Studies

“…The geometrical representation of morphological features relies on structured combinations of natural class nodes (cf. Harley & Ritter 2002;Cowper 2005). In line with this view, more complex features involve more nodes, which, in turn, will be more difficult to acquire and master.…”

Reductio ad discrimen: Where features come from

“…Cowper (2005) and Kyriakaki (2006) have argued that in English and Greek, events are marked relative to states. They thus propose that eventive clauses in those two languages are characterized by the presence of a privative feature EVENT.…”

“…To be evaluated, propositions must be deictically anchored. The features that perform this anchoring may be temporal, personal, or locative (Ritter and Wiltschko 2009), and there is also variation among different kinds of temporal anchoring systems (Cowper 2005), but the shared property of deictic anchoring identifies an apparently universal class of Infl features. In the internal structure of events, we find that languages in general have features that represent inner aspect (Clarke 2013) and that introduce arguments (Kratzer 1996, Pylkkänen 2008; the cross-linguistic recurrence of these kinds of features presumably reflects the way events are structured in the C-I system.…”

“…More recently, building on prior work in phonology, privative features in dependency relations have been used in morphosyntax as well, as in the work of Harley (1994), Harley and Ritter (2002a;, Béjar (2003;, Cowper (2005), and McGinnis (2005;, though Harbour (2013) argues for equipollent features in morphosyntax.…”