Introduction to double issue 41.1–2 on Features

• Published in: Nordlyd
• Main Authors: Peter Svenonius, Martin Krämer
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English; Norwegian
• Published: Septentrio Academic Publishing 2015
• Subjects: Language. Linguistic theory. Comparative grammar; P101-410; Tromsø
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.7557/12.3416; https://doaj.org/article/604c1330a79645659949bcbae899f780

This special double issue (41.1 and 41.2) contains 11 articles on the formal properties of linguistic feature systems, all of which were presented at a conference in Tromsø in the fall of 2013. The issue was jointly edited by Martin Krämer, Sandra Ronai, and Peter Svenonius. A version of the original call for papers posted in 2013 follows. All formal models of linguistics assume sets of features in terms of which generalizations can be stated. But the nature of the features themselves is often not explicitly addressed. In this special double issue of Nordlyd we focus on the nature of features across phonology and syntax and related domains of linguistics. One group of questions concerns the ‘grounding’ of features in substance or content. For example, phonological features may be grounded in phonetics, and syntactic features may be grounded in semantics. Innatist traditions have sometimes posited innate universal inventories of grounded features. The ‘substance-free’ movement in phonology argues instead that the formal properties of features can and should be radically dissociated from their grounding in content. Sign language phonology would seem to support this position, as the featural system of sign language phonology operates with a completely different set of articulators from those used in spoken languages. Minimalist syntax also frequently promotes the dissociation of formal properties of features from their content (as in the proposal that tense is simply one of a variety of ways in which Infl may be ‘grounded,’ favored in Indo-European languages but with various other languages opting for other content for Infl). Such proposals raise many questions concerning how feature systems are constrained to be uniform across languages and to what extent they are free to vary. The radically opposing view in phonology denies the existence of categorical features altogether and attempts to model phonological patterns as statistical computation of phonetic data. The formal structure of features raises another set of ...