Impossible Persons

Name: Impossible Persons
Price: 85 AUD
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ISBN: 9780262529297

Daniel Harbour (Queen Mary, University of London)

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English

MIT Press
04 November 2016

Grammar, syntax; Lexicography

Series: Linguistic Inquiry Monographs

A groundbreaking, comprehensive formal theory of grammatical person that recasts its empirical foundations and re-envisions its theoretical core.

Impossible Persons, Daniel Harbour's comprehensive and groundbreaking formal theory of grammatical person, upends understanding of auniversal and ubiquitousgrammatical category. Breaking with much past work, Harbour establishes three core theses, one empirical, one theoretical, and one metatheoretical. Together, these redefine the data subsumed under the rubric of ""person,"" simplify the feature inventory that a theory of person must posit, and restructure the metatheory in which feature theory as a whole resides.

At itsheart, Impossible Personsposesa simple question of the possible versus the actual- in how many ways could languages configure their person systems, in how many do they configure them, and what explains the size and shape of the shortfall? Harbour's empirical thesis-that the primary object of study for persons are partitions, not syncretisms-transforms a sea of data into a categorical problem of the attested and the absent. Positing, innovatively, that features denote actions, not predicates, he shows thattwo features alonegenerate all and only the attested systems. Thisapparently poorinventory yields rich explanatory dividends, covering the morphological composition of person, its interaction with number, its connection to space, and properties of its semantics and linearization. Moreover, the core properties of this approach are shared with Harbour's earlier work on number features. Jointly, these results establish an important metatheoretical corollaryconcerning the balance betweenrichnessoffeature semanticsand restrictiveness offeature inventories.

This corollary holds deep implications for how linguists should approach feature theory in future.

By: Daniel Harbour (Queen Mary University of London)
Imprint: MIT Press
Country of Publication: United States
Volume: 74
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 14mm
Weight: 408g
ISBN: 9780262529297
ISBN 10: 0262529297
Series: Linguistic Inquiry Monographs
Pages: 336
Publication Date: 04 November 2016
Recommended Age: From 18
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Daniel Harbour is Professor of Cognitive Science of Language at Queen Mary University of London.