## Some observations on privative features

🕑 9 min • 👤 Thomas Graf • 📆 June 11, 2019 in Discussions • 🏷 features, privativity, phonology, syntax

One topic that came up at the feature workshop is whether features are privative or binary (aka equipollent). Among mathematical linguists it’s part of the general folklore that there is no meaningful distinction between the two. Translating from a privative feature specification to a binary one is trivial. If we have three features $$f$$, $$g$$, and $$h$$, then the privative bundle $$\{f, g\}$$ is equivalent to $$[+f, +g, -h]$$. In the other direction, we can make binary features privative by simply interpreting the $$+$$/$$-$$ as part of the feature name. That is to say, $$-f$$ isn’t a feature $$f$$ with value $$-$$, it’s simply the privative feature $$\text{minus} f$$. Some arguments add a bit of sophistication to this, e.g. the Boolean algebra perspective in Keenan & Moss’s textbook Mathematical Structures in Language. So far so good unsatisfactory.

## Underappreciated arguments: The inverted T-model

🕑 9 min • 👤 Thomas Graf • 📆 May 15, 2019 in Discussions • 🏷 syntax, transductions, bimorphisms, T-model

There’s many conceptual pillars of linguistics that are, for one reason or another, considered contentious outside the field. This includes the competence/performance split, the grammar/parser dichotomy, underlying representations, or the inverted T-model. These topics have been discussed to death, but they keep coming up. Since it’s tiring to hear the same arguments over and over again, I figure it’d be interesting to discuss some little known ones that are rooted in computational linguistics. This will be an ongoing series, and its inaugural entry is on the connection between the T-model and bimorphisms.