Summary Details
| Query: |
Morphosyntactic Features: 2nd summary
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| Author: | Mike_Maxwell Mike_Maxwell | |
| Submitter Email: | click here to access email | |
| Linguistic LingField(s): |
Morphology
Syntax |
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| Summary: |
My short summary (in LinguistList 9.1599) concerning morphosyntactic features stirred up several orders of magnitude more response than my original query (in LL 9.1405). The responses have slowed to a trickle now, which I'll try to summarize, then offer some comments at the end. With luck, this will turn into as extended a discussion as my query several years ago re linguistics in science fiction :-). In addition to responses directly to LL (9.1616, 9.1631 and 9.1634), I have received responses from the following (in order of receipt): Heidi Harley (hharley@ling.upenn.edu), Dan Everett (dever+@pitt.edu), Rich Campbell (campbell@Oakland.edu), Valerie Baggaley (pmillar@cadvision.com), Leslie Barrett (barrett@jespersen.cs.nyu.edu), Daniel E. Collins (collins.232@osu.edu), Robert Beard (rbeard@bucknell.edu), Annabel Cormack (annabel@linguistics.ucl.ac.uk), Simon Musgrove (S.Musgrave@linguistics.unimelb.edu.au), George Huttar (George_Huttar@sil.org), and David Fertig (fertig@acsu.buffalo.edu). Among the resources suggested were the following: Books: Everett, Dan. 1996. Why There are no Clitics: An alternative perspective on pronominal allomorphy. Dallas: SIL. A forthcoming book edited by Martin Everaert with articles "on lexical features and syntax." (To be published by Erlbaum?) Robert Beard, 1995. Lexeme-Morpheme Base Morphology. SUNY Press, 1995. (see also http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/rbeard/index.html, which appears to be a sort of summary of the book) Greenberg. 1966. _Language Universals_. Janua Linguarum Bernard Comrie's books on tense and aspect. Emonds, Joseph (1985) _A Unified Theory of Syntactic Categories_. Foris, Dordrecht. Spencer, Andrew. 1991. Morphological Theory. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Papers: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~hharley/paperindex.html (two specific papers are entitled "Meaning in Morphology: motivating a feature-geometric analysis of person and number", by Harley and Ritter; and "Hug a tree: deriving the morphosyntactic feature hierarchy", by Harley) Ritter, Elizabeth. 1997. "Agreement in the Arabic Prefix Conjugations: Evidence for Non-linear approach to person, number and gender features." Proc. of the 1997 Annual Conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association. Leslie Barrett and Ruth Reeves. (unpublished as yet) "Asymmetries in the Morphosyntax of -ee and -er Argument Nominalizations" Jakobson, Roman: several papers, including "General Meaning of the Russian Cases," "Morphological Observations on Slavic Declension," "Structure of the Russian Verb," and "Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the Russian Verb." They appear in Jakobson's "Selected Works, vol 1" and in his "Russian and Slavic Grammar" (Berlin, 1984). Silverstein (1976) "Hierarchy of features and ergativity." In Dixon, R.M.W.(ed) _Grammatical Categories in Australian Languages_ Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies Silverstein (1993) "Of nominatives and datives: Universal Grammar from the bottom up." In Van Valin, R.D. (ed) _Advances in Role and Reference Grammar_ Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Dechaine, Rose-Marie (1993) _Predicates across categories_ University of Massachusetts dissertation. [available through the Graduate Linguistic Student Association at glsa@linguist.umass.edu] Emonds, Joseph (1987) Parts of speech in generative grammar. _Linguistic Analysis_ 17: 3-42. Wunderlich, Dieter (1996) Lexical categories. _Theoretical Linguistics_ 22: 2-48. Croft (1990) A conceptual framework for grammatical categories. _Journal of Semantics_ 7: 245-279. Dissertations: An MIT dissertation by Eulalia Bonet Nicholas Ostler's MIT dissertation from 1979 "which attempts to derive a universal set of semantic/thematic roles from primitive semantic features." ---------------------------------------------------------COMMENTS------------- OK, so why did I get so little response before, and so much of a response now? The truth of the matter is I don't know, but it may be because my original query was fairly specific and/or hard to understand (I'd say vague, but I guess it can't be specific and vague at the same time!), and my summary more general. Here is what I was after: In phonology, there has been a list of _universal_ phonetically-based features for a number of years. There's some debate about a few of them, as well as debate about their organization into a hierarchy, but by and large the list is fairly stable. In "morphosyntax" (I'll try to define that in a moment), there is very little agreement about any universal feature system. There could be several reasons for that: there aren't any universals in this area, or there are but they're hard to find, or there are but no one is interested. I suspect the real reason is a combination of these. What do I mean by "morphosyntactic features"? (This seemed to occasion some confusion.) In my original msg, I wrote: By 'morphosyntactic features', I'm referring to the kind of features that are used in verbal agreement (subject and/or object person, etc.), tense/aspect, case marking, negation, etc. etc.; or parts of speech systems (+/-N and +/-V a la Chomsky and Jackendoff, for instance). In other words, features which are "visible" to morphology, or to syntax, or to both, but not phonological/ phonetic features. (There are theoretical issues in this, but I want to cast the net reasonably wide.) I wanted to hear not so much about typologies, as about the feature systems underlying such typologies. One example I gave is the analysis of "person" as [+/-Speaker] and [+/-Hearer], rather than just [1/2/3 Person]. The latter is a typology; there is some agreement that the former pair of features actually underlies the typology, and it is the underlying features that I'm interested in. (Perhaps my remarks about "typology" were construed as negative, for which I apologize.) There may be some sorts of morphosyntactic features which are not universal--those defining extended "gender" systems, for instance. But I am assuming that at least some morphosyntactic features are universal. Well, that's what I was (and am) after. Thanks for the response thus far, and I look forward to hearing more. Mike Maxwell Mike_Maxwell@sil.org Summer Institute of Linguistics |
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| LL Issue: | 9.1644 | |
| Date Posted: | 19-Nov-1998 | |
| Original Query: | Read original query | |
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