May 27-28, Tromsø
This event is organized by Peter Svenonius and Craig Sailor
All talks will be held in E0105 in the east wing of the SV-HUM building on the Tromsø campus.
Program
| Monday, May 27th | |
| 0930‑1045 | Thomas Graf, Stony Brook University |
| ‘Features: More trouble than they’re worth?’ | |
| 1045-1100 | Coffee break |
| 1100-1215 | Daniel Harbour, Queen Mary University London |
| ‘Maximal use of [±minimal]’ | |
| 1215-1330 | Lunch |
| 1330-1445 | Michelle Sheehan, Anglia Ruskin University |
| ‘Why successive cyclic movement must be feature-driven, an indirect argument from the lack of successive cyclic A-movement’ | |
| 1445-1500 | Coffee break |
| 1500-1615 | Susana Béjar, University of Toronto |
| ‘How to be a picky probe’ | |
| Tuesday, May 28th | |
| 1000-1115 | Peter Svenonius, University of Tromsø — The Arctic University of Norway |
| ‘Structural case is the solution to a locality problem’ | |
| 1115-1130 | Coffee break |
| 1130-1245 | Omer Preminger, University of Maryland |
| ‘What are φ-features supposed to do, and where?’ | |
| 1245-1400 | Lunch |
| 1400-1600 | Plotting |
Workshop description
Features are an indispensible part of any grammatical system, but there is little consensus on some of their essential properties. For this reason, it could be said that there are currently ‘thirty million theories of features’ in the same sense that Jim McCawley complained over thirty years ago that there were thirty million theories of grammar — he supposed that there were at least 25 independent unresolved issues such as whether deep structure encoded order or not and whether anaphors were full noun phrases at deep structure or not, giving something like 30 million viable combinations.
Today there are easily more than 25 independent unresolved issues concerning features, such as whether there are Edge features influencing Merge, whether there is an Activity condition restricting Agree to targets with unchecked features, whether valuation is independent of interpretability, whether all probes can search upward if they find no goals below, whether heads can bear more than one syntactically active feature, whether noun phrases require case licensing, and so on.
This workshop gathers people who have thought deeply about features from different perspectives to discuss some of these fundamental issues.