I just came back from a workshop in Tromsø on syntactic features, organized by Peter Svenonius and Craig Sailor — thanks for the invitation, folks! Besides yours truly, the invited speakers were Susana Béjar, Daniel Harbour, Michelle Sheehan, and Omer Preminger. I think it was a very interesting and productive meeting with plenty of fun. We got along really well, like a Justice League of feature research (but who’s Aquaman?).

In the next few weeks I’ll post on various topics that came up during the workshop, in particular privative features. But for now, I’d like to comment on one particular issue that regards the feature representation of number and how it matters for omnivorous number and Kiowa inverse marking. Peter has an excellent write-up on his blog, and I suggest that the main discussion about features should be kept there. This post will present a very different point of view that basically says “suck it, features!” and instead uses hierarchies and monotonicity.

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