Phi features

In linguistics, especially within generative grammar, phi features (denoted with the Greek letter φ 'phi') are the morphological expression of a semantic process in which a word or morpheme varies with the form of another word or phrase in the same sentence. This variation can include person, number, or gender as encoded in pronominal agreement with nouns and pronouns (the latter are said to consist only of phi-features, containing no lexical head). Several other features are included in the set of phi-features, such as the categorical features ±N (nominal) and ±V (verbal), which can be used to describe lexical categories. Phi-features are often thought of as the "silent" features that exist on lexical heads (or, according to some theories, within the syntactic structure) that are understood for number, gender, person or reflexivity. Due to their silent nature, phi-features are often only understood if someone is a native speaker of a language, or if the translation includes a gloss of all these features. Many languages exhibit a pro-drop phenomenon which means that they rely on other lexical categories to determine the phi-features of the lexical heads.

In linguistics, especially within generative grammar, phi features (denoted with the Greek letter φ 'phi') are the morphological expression of a semantic process in which a word or morpheme varies with the form of another word or phrase in the same sentence. This variation can include person, number, or gender as encoded in pronominal agreement with nouns and pronouns (the latter are said to consist only of phi-features, containing no lexical head). Several other features are included in the set of phi-features, such as the categorical features ±N (nominal) and ±V (verbal), which can be used to describe lexical categories. Phi-features are often thought of as the "silent" features that exist on lexical heads (or, according to some theories, within the syntactic structure) that are understood for number, gender, person or reflexivity. Due to their silent nature, phi-features are often only understood if someone is a native speaker of a language, or if the translation includes a gloss of all these features. Many languages exhibit a pro-drop phenomenon which means that they rely on other lexical categories to determine the phi-features of the lexical heads. ===Number=== The grammatical term number is the name of the system contrasting singular and plural. In English, number agreement is not expressed through agreement of verbal elements like they are in other languages (though present tense verbs do agree in number with third person subjects). This is partly because English is a language that requires subjects and the subjects in English overtly express number. Instead, English number is a phi-feature that is inflected on nouns when the nominal phrase is plural. The most common in English is -s inflected on nouns that are plural: - Ducks, fridges, baseballs, cups, books, mirrors, cars, buildings, clowns, bridges, creams.... Some cases of plurality in English require inflection within the noun to express the phi-feature of plurality: - Men, women, mice, teeth.... Neither verbs nor adjectives are used to agree with the number feature of the noun that they are agreeing with in English. Some languages, however, like Salish Halkomelem, differ from English in their syntactic categorization of plural marking. Halkomelem allows for both marked and unmarked plural forms of its nouns. It also allows for the determiners to be marked or unmarked in their plurality. Plural nouns and determiners in Halkomelem can be freely combined as well, but it appears that if a determiner is plural in a phrase it is sufficient to pluralize the noun that it modifies: ===Gender=== English is a language that does not have nominal phrases that belong to a gender class where agreement of other elements in the phrase is required. Dutch is another language that only differentiates between neuter and the common gender. Many other languages of the world do have gender classes. German, for example, has three genders; feminine, masculine and neuter. For a Romance language like Italian, there are feminine and masculine genders. Inflections on the adjectives and determiners are used for gender agreement within the pronominal phrase. English only expresses gender when the pronoun addresses a specific person who semantically belongs to a certain gender. See the table below for Pronominal Case Forms in English under 3 sg. fem/masc. In many languages, reflexivity is not overt for person. A prime example is apparent in French se. French se is used to express reflexivity for every expression of the third person, regardless of gender or number. It also functions as a middle, an inchoative, an applicative and an impersonal. For this reason, some theories suggest that reflexive phi-features for languages such as French posit in a level on the syntactic structure that is silent, between the determiner and the noun. This creates a new "silent" projection to a node specifically for φ-reflexives in French structure. CIS:cislocative NE:Mohawk prenominal particle This change utilizes /v-hne/ as can be compared with the verb present in sentence 1b), 'fallen'. Example 2) demonstrates the use of 'big' without inflecting for tense (/v-hne/), but instead we see, /-v/. ===Syntactic analysis=== This analysis states that the category is determined by syntax or context. A root word is inserted into the syntax as bare and the surrounding syntax determines if it will behave as a verb or a noun. Once the environment has determined its category, morphological inflections also surface on the root according to the determined category. Typically, if the element before it is a determiner, the word will surface as a noun, and if the element before it is a tense element, the root word will surface as a verb. The example in the photo shows an example from Italian. The root of the word is cammin- ("walk"). This word could surface as either a noun or verb. The first tree shows that when the element before is a D "una", the root will be an N and the following morphology will inflect -ata which is the correct full orthography for the noun "walk" in Italian. The tree on the right shows a similar process but in the environment where the root follows a tense element, and the morphology inflects -o as a suffix, which makes the verb surface not only as a verb, but as discussed before in person agreement, also shows that this is the first person present form of the verb ("I walk"). ===Combinatorial analysis=== Syntactic decomposition for categorization of parts of speech includes an explanation for why some verbs and nouns have a predictable relationship to their nominal counterparts and why some don't. It says that the predictable forms are denominal and that the unpredictable forms are strictly root-derived. The examples provided are of the English verbs hammer and tape. A verb such as hammer is a root-derived form, meaning that it can appear within an NP or within a VP. A denominalized verb, such as tape must first be converted from an NP because its meaning relies on the semantics of the noun. The discussion of how categorical features are determined is still up for debate and there have been numerous other theories trying to explain how words get their meanings and surface in a category. This is an issue within categorical distinction theories that has not yet come to a conclusion which is agreed upon in the linguistic community. This is interesting because phi-features in terms of person, number and gender are concrete features that have been observed numerous times in natural languages, and are consistent patterns that are rooted in rule-based grammar. ==References== __FORCETOC__

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