All proceedings
Enter a document #:
Enter search terms:

Info for readers Info for authors Info for editors Info for libraries Order form Shopping cart

Share Paper 3758

Two φ-Feature Sets on Honorific Nouns
Gurmeet Kaur
292-299 (complete paper or proceedings contents)

Abstract

This paper presents nouns that refer to a singular honorific individual (henceforth SG.HON nouns) from Punjabi. A SG.HON noun in the language exhibits the following two properties: first, while it occurs without nominal plural morphology, it always triggers plural DP-external agreement. This plural agreement is masculine, even when the SG.HON noun is feminine. Secondly, feminine SG.HON nouns in Punjabi can trigger either masculine plural or feminine singular DP-internal agreement. Their masculine counterparts can only control masculine plural DP-internal agreement, however. This paper claims that SG.HON nouns in Punjabi host a dual specification of number and gender features at different heights within the nominal structure. The higher phi-feature set consists of a plural and a masculine feature, hosted together on an Honorific Projection. The lower phi-feature set consists of the inherent gender feature on n and the semantic number feature (here, singular) on the Number head. Employing standard mechanisms of (downward) Agree coupled with phrasal spell-out, this structure derives both of the aforementioned properties of SG.HON nouns in Punjabi.

Published in

Proceedings of the 41st West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
edited by Nikolas Webster, Yağmur Kiper, Richard Wang, and Sichen Larry Lyu
Table of contents
Printed edition: $545.00