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« Seminar on Meaning and Intonation | Main | Prism of Grammar»

Seminar on Phi-Features

Rajesh Bhatt is teaching a seminar on Phi features this semester. The course meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:30-3:45, in Hasbrouck Lab Add 106. The Tuesday meetings are open to everyone; the Thursday meetings are only for those who are [+enrolled] or at least [+did the reading]. Here's the syllabus, and a course abstract too:

Phi-features (Person, Number, Gender) play an important role in linguistic theory. For example, the uninterpretable/interpretable distinction on phi-features is taken to be the driving force behind most syntactic operations in versions of the Minimalist Program. In this course, we will explore how the syntactic system manipulates phi-features giving rise to the phenomena of Agreement. We will also examine how there are significant distinctions between different kinds of phi-features. These differences become visible in a number of domains: in morphosyntax via agreement restrictions and the person-case constraint, and in semantics via constraints on interpretation. Our goal will be to develop an integrated understanding of the fundamental properties of phi-features. This will involve a proper appreciation of the asymmetries between the different kinds of phi-features and how these asymmetries might follow from the design of the basic syntactic primitives.