ABSTRACT
Recently there have been some interesting attempts to extend the phonological notion of feature underspecification (e.g. Archangeli 1984) to features of syntactic agreement. Burzio (1992) has made use of the notion of underspecification to describe the parameterization of anaphors across languages, and Van Gelderen (1992) argues that Dutch het ‘it’ and Middle English it are unspecified for number. Kayne (1989b) has argued in favor of an underspecified analysis of English so-called ‘third person’ -s (Rain falls), suggesting that this morpheme does not mark [3rd person] but [+ sg] in English. Kayne argues that first and second person are unmarked for number. Vanden Wyngaerd (1994) discusses Kayne's proposal, and convincingly argues that unmarkedness of features has to be represented by zero-marked features, which can be taken to be [0number, 1st person] in the case of I. Similarly, third person -s should be [+ sg, 0person, 0gender]. Vanden Wyngaerd (1994: 164) shows that unmarkedness cannot correspond to the mere absence of features, since the mere absence of features cannot give rise to a feature clash. He argues that in you sing the [2nd person, +pl] you cooccurs with the bare form of the verb which is unmarked for features. Since in this case the absence of common features does not give rise to a feature clash, there should not be a feature clash either in the cooccurrence of [1st person] I and [+ sg] -s in * I sings. Vanden Wyngaerd therefore concludes that the absence of number in the feature specification of I should be marked by a zero number feature that would clash with [+ sg] -s, on the plausible assumption that agreement requires strict identity of features. A feature [0number] (= Vanden Wyngaerd's (1994) [0 sg]) would certainly clash with [+ sg] -s.
