UCLA

This thesis is a study of the featural representation of nominal number. By looking at patterns of agreement when 1st and 2nd person arguments interact, I argue that the expression of morpholog- ical number does not involve dedicated plural features (e.g., [+plural]). Instead, morphological number is dependent on multiple, privative, atomic features ([INDIVIDUAL]), essentially extend- ing into morphology a standard semantic theory of nominal plurality (Link 1983, Schwarzschild 1992). A feature bundle containing more than one [INDIVIDUAL] feature is mapped to a plural exponent. The empirical discussion centers on agreement in LOCAL contexts, where a 1st or 2nd person acts on another 1st or 2nd person. In many languages, two singular arguments may result in plural morphology on the verb. I show that the plural morphology results from a single syntactic head copying phi-features from two different argument positions, "building" a plural feature bun- dle. I extend the discussion beyond local agreement contexts, and show how Individual Number can account for a large range of data. The proposed theory attempts to unify morphological and semantic representations within a Minimalist framework (Chomsky 1995, 2000, 2001)