Chris Hammerly will present a research sem inar in the TFS seminar room.
Deriving person-based prominence eff
ects: A set-based theory of AGREE
Person-based prominence effects
occur when certain person categories or features are privileged by the gram
mar in agreement\, case\, word order\, and more. Over the past 25 years\, t
he feature geometry of Harley & Ritter (2002) and Béjar (2003) has been wid
ely employed to capture these effects\, especially in agreement. The first
goal of this talk is to argue that the feature geometry is in fact secon
d order in the sense that it describes properties that hold between fea
tures but should not be encoded in the representation itself. The second go
al 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 advan
tage over the feature geometry\, I show that reformulating AGREE to operate
over sets of primitives allows all and only the possible range of person-b
ased prominence effects to be captured. The feature geometry is shown to ha
ve more limited empirical coverage\, further favoring the proposed represen
tation and reformulation of AGREE