Abstract for Jed Shahar's talk

Phi-features organized
Jed Shahar (CUNY Graduate Center)
September 6, 2005 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

Much of the recent work on phi-feature organization has been carried out in the domain of Distributed Morphology (DM) (Harley & Ritter (2002), Harley (2004)). DM differs from the traditional model most significantly at the point where vocabulary items are inserted during the derivation. For DM, vocabulary insertion comes after syntax and morphology manipulate features. For the more traditional view, vocabulary items and features enter the derivation together, before the syntactic operations of merge and move. Although there will be a discussion of how a feature hierarchy works in both models, a position on which to use is not seen as critical. Instead the primary focus of the discussion is improving the Harley & Ritter model to account for a broader range of empirical facts (more pronominal systems), and a more detailed set of constraints (cross-language universals). If time permits there will be a discussion of how the new hierarchy handles English agreement paradigms.