Syntax Workshop on Monday (4:30 in ILC N451) will feature a talk by Chris Hammerly entitled: (Un)interpretability and the representation of morphosyntactic features. Here’s an abstract:
In the talk, I argue that the distinction between uninterpretable and interpretable features is unnecessary. All of the functions that have been attributed to this distinction can either be derived directly from mechanisms of the grammar, or subsumed under other independently motivated representational properties of features. I focus particularly on deriving facts regarding the interpretation of features at LF, with a keen eye towards the use of interpretability in agreement systems. This is very much work in progress, so I ask people to bring their favorite instance of where the interpretability distinction has been used to see if my claim holds up.
