This section on where features come from is, of necessity, speculative. We’ll now turn to a much more practical use of features. 4 Features and affix-hop This section will apply some of the knowledge we have about features and interpretable and uninterpretable features to one practical problem, namely Affix Hop. In chapter 5, we saw that auxiliaries choose the morphological type of verb on their right. In (4), the perfective have needs a past participle, as in (4a), not a present participle, as (4b) shows. (4) a. She has left. b. *She has leaving. Radford (2000) makes the argument that the features on the participle are the interpretable ones and I follow that. That means that, in (4), the uninterpretable aspect features of the functional head have check with the interpretable features on left. Tree (5a) shows the unvalued state and (5b) the valued one. The participle ending on left is therefore responsible for the (present) perfect meaning. (5) a. ASPP b. ASPP ei ei ASP VP > ASP VP 5 5 have have [u-asp] she left [u-asp: perf] she left [i-perf] [i-perf]
This section on where features come from is, of necessity, speculative. We’ll now turn to a much more practical use of features. 4 Features and affix-hop This section will apply some of the knowledge we have about features and interpretable and uninterpretable features to one practical problem, namely Affix Hop. In chapter 5, we saw that auxiliaries choose the morphological type of verb on their right. In (4), the perfective have needs a past participle, as in (4a), not a present participle, as (4b) shows. (4) a. She has left. b. *She has leaving. Radford (2000) makes the argument that the features on the participle are the interpretable ones and I follow that. That means that, in (4), the uninterpretable aspect features of the functional head have check with the interpretable features on left. Tree (5a) shows the unvalued state and (5b) the valued one. The participle ending on left is therefore responsible for the (present) perfect meaning. (5) a. ASPP b. ASPP ei ei ASP VP > ASP VP have 5 have 5 [u-asp] she left [u-asp: perf] she left [i-perf] [i-perf]
SyntaxBook.docx