Overview
Impossible Persons, Daniel Harbour's comprehensive and groundbreaking formal theory of grammatical person, upends understanding of aĀ universal and ubiquitousĀ grammatical 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 āperson,ā simplify the feature inventory that a theory of person must posit, and restructure the metatheory in which feature theory as a whole resides.
At itsĀ heart, Impossible PersonsĀ posesĀ a 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 thesisāthat the primary object of study for persons are partitions, not syncretismsātransforms a sea of data into a categorical problem of the attested and the absent. Positing, innovatively, that features denote actions, not predicates, he shows thatĀ two features aloneĀ generate all and only the attested systems. ThisĀ apparently poorĀ inventory 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 corollaryĀ concerning the balance betweenĀ richnessĀ ofĀ feature semanticsĀ and restrictiveness ofĀ feature inventories.Ā This corollary holds deep implications for how linguists should approach feature theory in future.
This book title, Impossible Persons, ISBN: 9780262529297, by Daniel Harbour, published by MIT Press (November 4, 2016) is available in paperback. Our minimum order quantity is 25 copies. All standard bulk book orders ship FREE in the continental USA and delivered in 4-10 business days.
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