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The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

MorPhun 2/23 - Peter Grishin (MIT)

Speaker: Peter Grishin (MIT)
Title: Omnivorous agreement for third person in Algonquian
Time: Wednesday, February 23rd, 5pm – 6:30pm

Abstract: A common view is that third person is underspecified (Harley and Ritter 2002, a.m.o.): first and second person have features that third person doesn’t (e.g. [PART]), but third person doesn’t have any features that first and second lack. This kind of featural representation beautifully captures the default nature of third person: for instance, things like expletives and default agreement are invariably third person in language after language after language.

I want to show that, unfortunately, this view is untenable (see also Nevins 2007). Third person must have a feature that first and second person lack, because there is omnivorous agreement for third person. In Menominee, Innu-aimûn, and Plains Cree, the peripheral agreement suffix (standardly analyzed as a probe in C; Halle and Marantz 1993, Branigan and MacKenzie 1999, a.o.) shows the following pattern: it always agrees with the highest accessible third person DP, skipping over first and second persons. In fact, it doesn’t ever agree with first or second person DPs at all. In order to capture this behavior, the probe in C needs to be relativized to a feature that third persons have but first and second persons lack.

What should this feature be? I want to have a discussion with the audience about the ramifications this has for our feature theory. Do we just want to add an extra privative feature [3] to the standard set of privative features [PART, AUTH, ADDR]? Or do we want binary features, with third persons specified [–PART]? Additionally, if we have third person features, how do we capture the defaultness of third person crosslinguistically? I am not an expert here—y’all’s input is warmly requested. Let’s think through these issues together!