Sign language verb agreement and the ontology of morphosyntactic categories
Temas
Detalles
Inflectional morphology is of interest to syntacticians and morphologists alike because inflection provides a tangible window into syntactic categories. The very term morphosyntactic category denotes a category of a language that is identified on the basis of morphology that operates in the syntax. Where do such categories come from? We will call this the question of the ontology of morphosyntactic categories. Lillo-Martin and Meier (henceforth LM&M) raise three intriguing question about the ontology of morphosyntactic categories: first, how do we know if a language exhibits a given morphosyntactic category; second, where do morphosyntactic categories come from; and finally, related to the second, why do languages display the morphosyntactic categories that they do?