Chris Hammerly will present a research seminar in the TFS seminar room.
Deriving person-based prominence effects: A set-based theory of AGREE
Person-based prominence effects occur when certain person categories or features are privileged by the grammar in agreement, case, word order, and more. Over the past 25 years, the feature geometry of Harley & Ritter (2002) and Béjar (2003) has been widely employed to capture these effects, especially in agreement. The first goal of this talk is to argue that the feature geometry is in fact second order in the sense that it describes properties that hold between features but should not be encoded in the representation itself. The second goal is to propose a new level of representation termed primitives (as inspired by Harbour’s 2016 theory of person) that that provides a first order account of prominence effects. Besides having a conceptual advantage over the feature geometry, I show that reformulating AGREE to operate over sets of primitives allows all and only the possible range of person-based prominence effects to be captured. The feature geometry is shown to have more limited empirical coverage, further favoring the proposed representation and reformulation of AGREE
