On Markedness Asymmetries in Person and Number

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Extensive typological research on systems of pronouns and agreement has led to a number of important discoveries about the representation of morphosyntactic features. For example, Harley and Ritter (2002; H&R) propose a universal geometry of person, number, and gender features (1), which captures a wide array of pronominal systems in the languages of the world (p. 486). H&R argue against the more traditional approach of using unstructured binary features to represent person and number categories, maintaining that such approaches can only stipulate certain implicational universals noted by Greenberg (1963).1 H&R propose instead that pronominal categories are represented by a hierarchical organization of privative features (see also Bonet 1991, Béjar 2003, Nevins 2003). Under this approach, implicational universals can be encoded in terms of dependency relations.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: