Phi features
[1] This variation can include person, number, gender, and case, as encoded in pronominal agreement with nouns and pronouns (the latter are said to consist only of phi-features, containing no lexical head).
[2] Phi-features are often thought of as the "silent" features that exist on lexical heads (or, according to some theories,[3] within the syntactic structure) that are understood for number, gender, person or reflexivity.
Due to their silent nature, phi-features are often only understood if someone is a native speaker of a language, or if the translation includes a gloss of all these features.
Chomsky first proposed that the N node in a clause carries with it all the features to include person, number and gender.
[5] Adjectives also carry phi-features in some languages, however, they tend to agree in number and gender but rarely for person.
The most common in English is -s inflected on nouns that are plural:- Ducks, fridges, baseballs, cups, books, mirrors, cars, buildings, clowns, bridges, creams....Some cases of plurality in English require inflection within the noun to express the phi-feature of plurality:- Men, women, mice, teeth....Neither verbs nor adjectives are used to agree with the number feature of the noun that they are agreeing with in English.
Some languages, however, like Salish Halkomelem, differ from English in their syntactic categorization of plural marking.
For this reason, some theories suggest that reflexive phi-features for languages such as French posit in a level on the syntactic structure that is silent, between the determiner and the noun.
[12] A key area of verbal agreement is attraction, in which case verbs are sensitive to the grammatical number of a noun phrase that is not the expected controller, but is close in vicinity.
[14] In English, agreement on a verb is triggered by the highest DP in subject position of a finite clause.
However, in Mohawk, an Indigenous language of North America, verbs agree with their subjects as well as their objects.
OkonOkoni-sʌk-kɔI-AUX-NEGi-diI-comeOkon i-sʌk-kɔ i-diOkon I-AUX-NEG I-come'Okon has still not come (in spite of...)'OkonOkoni-sɔp-pɔI-do.quickly-NEGi-dɔkI-makeekpat.bagOkon i-sɔp-pɔ i-dɔk ekpat.Okon I-do.quickly-NEG I-make bag'Okon did not make the bag quickly.'
Based on this reason, some scholars contend that since honorific marking is optional, it is not an instance of agreement.
[23] It has also been argued that adpositions (cover term for prepositions and postpositions[24]) are not part of the [+/-N] [+/-V] system as shown above.
The first tree shows that when the element before is a D "una", the root will be an N and the following morphology will inflect -ata which is the correct full orthography for the noun "walk" in Italian.
Syntactic decomposition for categorization of parts of speech includes an explanation for why some verbs and nouns have a predictable relationship to their nominal counterparts and why some don't.
A denominalized verb, such as tape must first be converted from an NP because its meaning relies on the semantics of the noun.
[31] The discussion of how categorical features are determined is still up for debate and there have been numerous other theories trying to explain how words get their meanings and surface in a category.
This is interesting because phi-features in terms of person, number and gender are concrete features that have been observed numerous times in natural languages, and are consistent patterns that are rooted in rule-based grammar.
