In:The Bantu–Romance Connection: A comparative investigation of verbal agreement, DPs, and information structure
Edited by Cécile De Cat and Katherine Demuth
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 131] 2008
► pp. 167–199
On the interpretability of φ-features
Published online: 26 September 2008
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.131.11zam
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.131.11zam
The paper reconsiders the evidence for the interpretable status of φ-features within DP in Romance languages, focusing on Italian. The conclusions are that, given a reasonably local interpretation of what counts as interpretable, gender is not an interpretable feature, and number (or plur, in the sense of Heycock & Zamparelli 2005) is interpretable, but is not sufficient to drive the process of verbal and predicative agreement. The notion of “default”, particularly with respect to the Person feature, is discussed and various alternatives are explored.
Cited by (6)
Cited by six other publications
Zamparelli, Roberto
2020.
Countability shifts and abstract nouns. In Mass and Count in Linguistics, Philosophy, and Cognitive
Science [Language Faculty and Beyond, 16], ► pp. 191 ff.
Zanini, Chiara, Rosa Rugani, Dunia Giomo, Francesca Peressotti & Francesca Franzon
Ihsane, Tabea & Petra Sleeman
2016. Gender agreement with animate nouns in French. In Romance Linguistics 2013 [Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory, 9], ► pp. 159 ff.
Kramer, Ruth
Carstens, Vicki & Michael Diercks
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