Syntactic and pragmatic features: a case study
Roberta D’Alessandro · Revista Leitura · 2004
In the generative literature, it has always been assumed ihat syntactic agreement takes place by means of syntactic operations that target the so-called p/íí-features.Lexical items are not atonaic, but rather made up of phonetic material pius syntactic features, whích enco e grammatical Information regarding, for example, number, gender, person, and case.According to Chomsky's Derivation by Phase, syntactic agreement happens between two lexical items when two operations take place: Merge and Agree.If both these operations occur, sptactic agreement is established.In this paper, I shall move some objecuons against the traditional idea of p/»"-features and agreement.These objections derive directly from data observation.I shall show that some agreement and interpretational pattems of Italian impersonal si an European Portuguese a gente constructions are unexplainable within e current generative theory.I shall therefore argue for the existence o ^ additional set of features encoding pragmatic/deiclic feature set, which I call the íigmc-set (see D'Alessandro, 2004), is responsible for the so-called semantic agreement phenomena that nave often been considered as solely acting in the pragmatic component of t e grammar (Wechsler and Zlatió, 2001).I propose instead that pragmatic information is encoded syntactically, in the sigma-set, which appears a least in personal pronouns.