Feature percolation
Erich R. Round · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2012
Chapter 8 presents a formal model of feature percolation, the mechanism by which features are distributed across appropriate terminal nodes in the non-surface syntactic tree, resulting in concord. It first discusses the needs of the realizational morphological component, which will act on the representations generated via percolation in order to calculate correct morphological forms. A discussion shows that the formal properties of percolation needed to account for the blocking of one feature by another, and for feature ordering, can be unified. A simple, iterative algorithm is adduced for percolation and examples are given.