CRISSP Seminar: Daniel Harbour

CRISSP is happy to announce another installment in the CRISSP Seminar series:

Lecturer: Daniel Harbour (Queen Mary University of London)

Title: The logical resources of person features

Date & time: Monday 11 May 2015, 17h

Location: CRISSP/KULeuven Brussels Campus, room 3101

Participation: free

Abstract

Traditionally, person features have been taken to denote predicates, with the minus value denoting logical negation. However, traditional features overgenerate person systems and must be constrained by ultimately nonexplanatory means (such as cooccurrence restrictions). This talk demonstrates that the need for ad hoc constraints vanishes if different logical resources are assumed. Specifically, person features denote power sets and feature values denote complementary operations by which sets act on one another. In tandem with this reconfiguration of the theory, I argue for a reenvisioning of the data pertinent to person theories, relegating syncretisms to secondary status and affording central position to partitions (superpositions of syncretisms) and treating person and spatial data on a par. Relative to these changes in data, the proposed theory generates all and only the required systems whilst deriving significant facts about their internal properties. These results suggest that the logical resources of feature theories in general are ripe for reconsideration.