Overview

In chapters 3 and 4, we discussed the ways in which words are projected into syntactic structures. In this chapter, we shall be concerned with the principles which determine the morphological form of words. The kinds of question we shall ask here include (for example) why we say We are winning not *Us are winning, or *We is winning, or *We are win. Why is it that we require we rather than us here, are rather than is, and winning rather than win? We shall suggest that the morphological properties of words can be characterized in terms of sets of grammatical features, and features must be checked in an appropriate manner: this chapter thus provides an introduction to the concept of checking. It should be noted that work on checking theory is as yet in its infancy, so that many of the ideas and descriptive details in this chapter are inevitably somewhat sketchy and speculative.

Interpretable and uninterpretable features

Before we explore feature-checking, however, let's first consider the overall organization of a grammar, and the role which features play in it. We assume that the sentence structures formed by successive merger operations must ultimately be mapped (i.e. converted) into two different kinds of structural representation for the sentence: (i) a representation of those aspects of the structure of the sentence which determine its phonetic form (= PF); and (ii) a representation of those aspects of the structure of the sentence which determine its logical form (= LF, i.e. linguistic aspects of the meaning of the sentence).