Abstract.  The Person Case Constraint is frequently concomitant with Case Syncretism. We provide a syntax‐driven account of both phenomena that relies on the dual role that φ‐features play in selecting and in Case‐licensing argument DPs. The account differs from other syntactic approaches to the PCC in the role it affords the applicative head in the Case system and in the attention it pays to the syntactic structures that feed morphology and therefore induce syncretism.

Personal reference, one of the simplest functions of human language, presents linguistic theory with one of its most basic problems: what is the range of possible person systems, and why? Impossible Persons offers an innovative and parsimonious solution to this problem and, in the process, formulates a fresh understanding of what features are in linguistic theory. Shifting the empirical focus away from syncretism towards more abstract partitions, the book shows that person and spatial deixis alike exploit the same small number of partitions, with a much greater number unattested in both domains. The challenge posed by this new empirical insight is met by positing just two features, which generate all and only the attested partitions without recourse to extrinsic constraints. To create this exact generative capacity, Impossible Persons refutes the standard view that features denote first order predicate. Instead, they and their values denote actions by sets on sets. This change in perspective yields a wide range of robust consequences, including a well saturated typology of morphological compositionality for different persons, a straightforward but novel view of how person and number interact in the syntax and semantics, a basis for the nexus between person and spatial deixis, and an understanding of the primitives of thought that ramifies beyond linguistics into more general cognitive scientific concerns.

Approximative numbers, like paucal and greater plural, can be characterized in terms of a feature, [±additive], concerned with additive closure. The two parameters affecting this feature (whether it is active and whether + and − values may cooccur) also affect the two features that generate nonapproximative numbers. All three features are shown to be derivative of concepts in the literature on aspect and telicity, to have a straightforwardly compositional semantics, and to eschew ad hoc stipulations on cooccurrence (such as geometries and filters). Thus, what is proposed is a general theory of number, free of extrinsic stipulations. Empirically, the theory yields a characterization of all numbers attested crosslinguistically, a combinatorial explanation of Greenberg-style implications affecting their cooccurrence, a natural account of morphological compositionality, and insight into their diachronic sources and trajectories.

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The semantic basis and morphosyntactic reflexes of Kiowa-Tanoan noun classification are perspicuously captured in a system with three bivalent number features: [±singular], [±augmented], [±group]. Privative analyses of the same facts require, inter alia, features without semantic motivation, syntactic mechanisms that violate Inclusivity, and feature annotation reminiscent of bivalence. The semantic atoms of number are, therefore, bivalent.