In the Jakobson/Halle tradition, morphological features were treated on par with phonological features. Binary features cross-classified a set of entities, phonemes in the case of Phonology and perhaps morphemes in the case of Morphology. Jakobson was clear that binary features project a multidimensional space for phonemes or morphemes. An alternative to cross-classificatory binary features would be a unidimensional linear hierarchy. Applied to the geometry of case, and to the issue of expected syncretism across cases in a language, the linear hierarchy predicts syncretism across continuous stretches of the hierarchy, while the binary feature approach predicts syncretism across neighbors in multidimensional space. 3 binary features project a cube, with each element (say, a case) at a vertex and syncretism predicted between elements connected by an edge.
Catherine Chvany describes Jackobson’s experiments with features for Slavic case in her paper, Chvany, Catherine V. “Jakobson’s fourth and fifth dimensions: On reconciling the cube model of case meanings with the two- dimensional matrices for case forms.” Case in Slavic (1986): 107-129, which we’ll read for my fall morphology course. Apparently, Jakobson explored a linear hierarchy of cases to account for case syncretism but moved to binary features, and a multi-dimensional case space, because observed syncretisms involved non-adjacent cases on the linear hierarchy. Morris Halle and I reached a similar conclusion from a paradigm of Polish cases in our “No Blur” paper.
Generative phonology has continually questioned whether shared behavior between phonological segments are best captured via cross-classifying binary features of the traditional sort or via some other representational system. Particle and Government Phonologies exploit privative unary features, and linear and more complicated hierarchies of such features have been explored in “feature geometries” of standard theories.
For morphology, linear hierarchies of monovalent features of the sort Jakobson abandoned have re-emerged most notably in Nanosyntax for the analysis of case, of person, gender and number, and of tense/aspect. I will blog about Nanosyntax later in the fall; here, one is tempted to remark that, as far as I can tell, Nanosyntacticians have not sufficiently tackled the sorts of generalization that led Jakobson away from linear case hierarchies or that motivated Halle & Marantz’s analysis of Polish. Here I would like to highlight a couple issues concerning the distribution of morphological features in words and phrases.
DM claims that some sets of features are not formed via syntactic merge. In Halle & Marantz 1993, these sets include sets for person/number/gender values of agreement morphemes, and features defining cases like nominative or dative.
From the point of view of canonical DM, the features of, say, person/number/gender and their organization could be investigated apart from the “merge and move” principles of syntactic structure building. The peculiarities of features in PNG bundles or case bundles might relate to the role of the features in semantic interpretation. Maybe some relevant features would be monovalent, and organized in a linear hierarchy, while others might be binary and cross-classificatory. The internal structure of such bundles might involve a theory like feature geometry in phonology — a fixed structure in which the individual features would find their unique positions. In phonology, it would seem strange to build a phoneme by free merge of phonetic features, checking the result of merge against some template — although perhaps this might be explored as an option.
If you have a fixed template of PNG features, or a strict linear hierarchy of monovalent case features, one needs to ask why syntactic merge should build this structure. In any case, the leading idea in DM would be that fixed hierarchies of features are internal to morphemes while the hierarchies of syntactic merge would be constrained by syntactic selection and by interpretation at the interfaces. I hope to explore later in this Blog the question of whether the mini-tree structures implied by selectional features are really equivalent to what’s encoded in a templatic hierarchy. In the recent history of DM, though, the working distinction between morpheme internal templatic structure and syntactic hierarchies of morphemes has played a role in research.
Thought 1. — The contrast between Jakobsonian and nanosyntactic case features is interesting. Have you looked at Caha ch5 (the semantic chapter) with Jakobson in mind? The facts presented look precisely like the ones that led Jakobson towards features that crossclassify, that is, as per Chvany, ones that led him away from a linear model.
Thought 2. — I find case very challenging, so much so that I’m thinking of dedicating a course to it. Jakobson’s arguments for features are compelling, but his semantics is questionable. Bierwisch and others since have rephrased his features asemantically (±governed, etc.); which results in ugly double bookkeeping, I believe. Dependent case potentially rehabilitates a syntactic approach (features inserted postsyntactically in response to syntactic configuration?), but what is the motivation, then, for decomposing cases into features, rather than calling them privatively Case1, Case2, … ? I wonder whether we need to combine this with ideas from Baker, Pesetsky, Richards, where functional heads contribute to the bundles of stuff that we regard as case.