Dalrymple and Kaplan, feature indeterminacy and feature resolution (2000) #

A syncretic form such as German was satisfies conflicting case requirements at once, and a coordinate noun phrase has a person or gender of its own computed from those of its conjuncts. Dalrymple and Kaplan represent both with set-valued features. An indeterminate value is the set of atomic values the form can realize and a contextual requirement is membership in it, so one value meets two requirements where equality against an atomic value, whether disjoined or left unspecified, cannot; a syncretic agreement form imposes an indeterminate requirement that distributes to the conjuncts of a coordinate subject. A resolving value is a set of markers, and the person or gender of a coordination is the union of its conjuncts' sets, the least set the subset annotations of the coordination rule allow. Resolving features are never indeterminate.

We prove that an indeterminate value is a syncretism class of a paradigm, read off the fragments for was, kogo, set, kaufen and the Xhosa and Chichewa subject prefixes, that unification of the two verbs' atomic requirements fails, and that underspecification, the universal set, overgenerates. The marker set of a person value is its largest participant set, and union on marker sets is the substrate's join of persons (markers_sup), so the Spanish, Slovak and Fula judgments follow from the conjuncts' persons; two markers bound the persons at four, and the intersection analysis of Sag, Gazdar, Wasow and Weisler is the complement dual, which loses Fula's clusivity with their first person. For gender, union reproduces Corbett's resolution rules on every coordination, not only on the paper's tables of pairs: Hindi's, Icelandic's (Corbett1991.Icelandic.rules), and Slovene's (Corbett1991.Slovene.rules) once the conjunction contributes a marker, which is where Slovene departs from same-gender congruence.

Main statements #

markers_sup: union on person marker sets is the join of persons.
Icelandic.map_resolve: union of the marker sets (119) reproduces Corbett's Icelandic rules on every coordination.
Slovene.map_resolve: with the conjunction's marker, union reproduces Corbett's Slovene rules.

Implementation notes #

The syncretism class is the maximal indeterminate value a form can bear; §4.5 leaves it to the speaker's lexicon whether a form bears it or the disjunction of its singletons, and the file analyses the grammars that accept the paper's examples.
The resolved value of a coordination cs is cs.toFinset.sup mark. That it is the minimal model of the subset annotations (93) is Finset.isLUB_sup, and the intersection dual of §6.5 is Finset.compl_sup.
Fula's first singular min has the exclusive's marker set (87), so it is the quadripartition's firstExclusive; the first person unmarked for clusivity has {S,H} (91).
A union claim reads only which genders occur, as Corbett's rules do (Agreement.ResolutionRule.resolve_congr), so it is checked on the sublists of a language's genders. Icelandic's genders are three of the comparative labels the fragment uses; the marker assignment sends the other three to ∅ and the claims are restricted to the three.

TODO #

The paper offers two accounts of Slovene and declines to choose; only the one on which the conjunction contributes F is formalized, and on the other coordinated neuters are neuter and the neuter plural verb form is what is restricted.

Dalrymple and Kaplan, feature indeterminacy and feature resolution (2000) #

Main statements #

Implementation notes #

TODO #

References #

Indeterminacy: set values and membership (§§3–4) #

Person resolution (§6) #

Gender resolution (§7) #

Resolving features are not indeterminate (§8) #