LINGUIST List 9.1616

Mon Nov 16 1998

Disc: Morphosyntax

Editor for this issue: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar <aristarlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Hutchinson, Larry, Morphosyntactic features

Lack of response to the query about morphosyntactic features is in
itself VERY interesting (LINGUIST 9.1599). One should wonder what
it says about linguistics as a discipline.

I myself didn't see the original query, so belatedly submit the
following observations:

1)	Grammatical gender: Lots of stuff over the centuries here.
Semantically predictable or not? Phonologically predictable or not? Sex
based or not? Maximal number of genders in a language?(Temne, a West
Atlantic language, has 24.)

2)	Noun classifiers and declension classes. These are noun features
that surely count as morphosyntactic features.

3)	All kinds of verb features have been discussed in the
literature. Conjugation classes, valence, rule-features, etc.

4) While many pronominal features can be argued to be semantic in
nature, lots could be considered morphosyntactic. Things such as status
(requiring honorific status on an agreeing category, say).