Person and Number in Pronouns: A Feature-Geometric Analysis

Harley, Heidi; Ritter, Elizabeth

doi:10.1353/lan.2002.0158

Cited by 644 publications

(469 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Explorations of feature geometry investigate the structural organization and hierarchical relationships in agreement systems (Ritter 1993;Harley 1994;Harley & Ritter 2002). Feature geometry identifies the feature categories of person, number, and gender; here we limit our investigation to number and gender only.…”

Section: Background: Feature Representation In the Native Spanish Basmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…First, person stands apart from the other features in its distribution (for example, unlike the other features, person agreement never appears on adjectives; see Baker 2008). Second, the hierarchical position of person relative to the other feature categories has been well established: it dominates the other features (Harley & Ritter 2002; among others). Meanwhile, the relationship between gender and number is less clear.…”

Section: Background: Feature Representation In the Native Spanish Basmentioning

confidence: 99%

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In support of representational economy: Agreement in heritage Spanish

Scontras

Polinsky

Fuchs

2018

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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This paper investigates the morphosyntax of number and gender agreement in English-dominant heritage speakers of Spanish. Our study builds on the experimental paradigm of agreement attraction developed by Fuchs et al. (2015) and elicits responses to agreement failures to diagnose the potentially-independent contributions of number and gender features. By comparing the structuring of these agreement categories in native and heritage Spanish, we document a case of grammatical divergence: heritage speakers restructure their agreement categories, favoring fewer feature values and less structure. The principled nature of this restructuring demonstrates that the loss of agreement in heritage languages is not superficial or accidental, but rather follows from predictable structural changes.

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Section: Background: Feature Representation In the Native Spanish Basmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Background: Feature Representation In the Native Spanish Basmentioning

confidence: 99%

In support of representational economy: Agreement in heritage Spanish

Scontras

Polinsky

Fuchs

2018

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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show abstract

“…They assume that features are fully specified in the syntax, but not in the morphology (Halle and Marantz, 1993;Harley and Noyer, 1999). In the morphology, singular and masculine are underspecified, whereas plural and feminine are marked (i.e., fully specified) (Bonet, 1995;Cowper, 2005;Harley, 1994;Harley and Ritter, 2002;Harris, 1991). For agreement to be successful, the features on lexical items must be compatible with those of the syntax.…”

Section: Theories On L2 Morphological Variabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Morphological variability in second language learners: An examination of electrophysiological and production data.

Bañón¹,

Miller²,

Rothman³

2017

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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We examined sources of morphological variability in second language (L2) learners of Spanish whose native language (L1) is English, with a focus on L1-L2 similarity, morphological markedness, and knowledge type (receptive vs. expressive). Experiment 1 uses event-related potentials to examine noun-adjective number (present in L1) and gender agreement (absent in L1) in online sentence comprehension (receptive knowledge). For each feature, markedness was manipulated, such that half of the critical noun-adjective combinations were feminine (marked) and the other half were masculine; half were used in the plural (marked) and the other half were used in the singular. With this setup, we examined learners' potential overreliance on unmarked forms or "defaults" (singular/masculine). Experiment 2 examines similar dependencies in spoken sentence production (expressive knowledge). Learners (n ϭ 22) performed better with number than gender overall, but their brain responses to both features were qualitatively native-like (i.e., P600), even though gender was probed with nouns that do not provide strong distributional cues to gender. In addition, variability with gender agreement was better accounted for by lexical (as opposed to syntactic) aspects. Learners showed no advantage for comprehension over production, and no systematic evidence of reliance on morphological defaults, although their online processing was sensitive to markedness in a native-like manner. Overall, these results suggest that there is facilitation for L2 properties that exist in the L1 and that markedness impacts L2 processing, but in a native-like manner. These results also speak against proposals arguing that adult L2ers have deficits at the level of the morphology or the syntax.

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“…The possible ways to grammatically express Number can cross-linguistically be formalized by different combinations of features. Harley & Ritter (2002) for example, have proposed that the possibilities can be captured by combining the features [plural], [augmented] and [group]. Be as it may in the case of Number, a cross-linguistic formalization in terms of abstract features is not straightforwardly conceivable in the case of Gender or noun classification systems, for various reasons.…”

Section: Gender Marking In Spanish a Short Surveymentioning

confidence: 99%

A note on the locus and function of formal gender

Picallo

2017

Borealis

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ABSTRACT. This note tries to assess the syntactic locus of grammatical Gender in the nominal structure with evidence mainly drawn from Spanish. Data from ellipsis resolution and its licensing in a variety of contexts, and for different types of syntactic objects, suggest the conjecture that noun classifying devices, such as grammatical Gender, may constitute the inflectional correlate of hierarchically organized, and possibly universal, nominality descriptors. Such descriptors would be coded in the structural space that, under different theoretical proposals, has been labelled as 'lexical phase', 'first phase' or 'little-n' space.Keywords: Gender, number, ellipsis, bare nominals, singularia/pluralia tantum, pronouns.RESUMEN: Esta nota tiene el objetivo de evaluar la posición sintáctica del género gramatical en la estructura nominal principalmente en base a la evidencia que ofrece el español. Los datos relativos a la resolución y legitimación de la elipsis en una variedad de contextos, y para diversos tipos de objetos sintácticos, sugieren la conjetura de que los mecanismos de clasificación nominal, tales como el género gramatical, podrían constituir el correlato flexivo de descriptores de nominalidad organizados jerárquicamente y posiblemente universales. Tales descriptores se codificarían en el espacio estructural que distintas propuestas teóricas denominan 'fase léxica', 'primera fase' o 'espacio n'.

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Person and Number in Pronouns: A Feature-Geometric Analysis

Cited by 644 publications

References 37 publications

In support of representational economy: Agreement in heritage Spanish

In support of representational economy: Agreement in heritage Spanish

Morphological variability in second language learners: An examination of electrophysiological and production data.

A note on the locus and function of formal gender

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