The paper reconsiders the evidence for the interpretable status of φ-features within DP in Romance languages, focusing on Italian. The conclusions are that, given a reasonably local interpretation of what counts as interpretable, gender is not an interpretable feature, and number (or plur, in the sense of Heycock & Zamparelli 2005) is interpretable, but is not sufficient to drive the process of verbal and predicative agreement. The notion of “default”, particularly with respect to the Person feature, is discussed and various alternatives are explored.
2016. The location of gender features in the syntax. Language and Linguistics Compass 10:11 ► pp. 661 ff.
Carstens, Vicki & Michael Diercks
2013. Agreeing How? Implications for Theories of Agreement and Locality. Linguistic Inquiry 44:2 ► pp. 179 ff.
Percus, Orin
2011. Gender features and interpretation: a case study. Morphology 21:2 ► pp. 167 ff.
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