Inessential features and expressive power of descriptive metalanguages
Geoffrey K. Pullum, Hans Joerg Tiede · 2010
Abstract Linguists feel intuitively that genuine features, those reflecting properties of natural language, are distinguishable from spurious ones – mere tricks exploiting feature machinery. Unfortunately, no such distinction is formally capturable, because eliminability of syntactic features in descriptions of sets of trees correlates with expressive power of the theoretical metalanguage assumed.