
Features of Person
From the Inventory of Persons to Their Morphological Realization
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Features of Person
From the Inventory of Persons to Their Morphological Realization
About this book
This book offers a significant reconceptualization of the person system in natural language. The authors, leading scholars in syntax and its interfaces, propose that person features do not have inherent content but are used to navigate a "person space" at the heart of every pronominal expression. They map the journey of person features in grammar, from semantics through syntax to the system of morphological realization. Such an in-depth cross-modular study allows the development of a theory in which assumptions made about the behavior of a given feature in one module bear on possible assumptions about its behavior in other modules.
The authors' new theory of person, built on a sparse set of two privative person features, delivers a typologically adequate inventory of persons; captures the semantics of personal pronouns, impersonal pronouns, and R-expressions; accounts for aspects of their syntactic behavior; and explains patterns of person-related syncretism in the realization of pronouns and inflectional endings. The authors discuss numerous observations from the literature, defend a number of theoretical choices that are either new or not generally accepted, and present novel empirical findings regarding phenomena as different as honorifics, number marking, and unagreement.
Frequently asked questions
- Essential is ideal for learners and professionals who enjoy exploring a wide range of subjects. Access the Essential Library with 800,000+ trusted titles and best-sellers across business, personal growth, and the humanities. Includes unlimited reading time and Standard Read Aloud voice.
- Complete: Perfect for advanced learners and researchers needing full, unrestricted access. Unlock 1.4M+ books across hundreds of subjects, including academic and specialized titles. The Complete Plan also includes advanced features like Premium Read Aloud and Research Assistant.
Please note we cannot support devices running on iOS 13 and Android 7 or earlier. Learn more about using the app.
Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Series page
- Title page
- Copyright page
- Series Foreword
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- 1: Person: A To-Do List
- 2: Person Features: Deriving the Inventory of Persons
- 3: Interactions between Person and Number
- 4: Impersonal Pronouns
- 5: The Symmetric Nature of Agreement
- 6: Syntactic Restrictions on Agreement
- 7: The Morphological Realization of Person
- 8: Conclusion
- References
- Index
- Linguistic Inquiry Monographs