Earticle

This paper will show that the noun and verb of agreement languages such as English and Icelandic have their own independent distinct syntactic processes to determine their feature values with reference to quirky dative subject constructions. It will be claimed that the u[person] and the u[number] of the verb undergo individual probings to determine the verbal agreement values, while another late full-phi Agree is required to value the u[Case] of the noun. Agreement-less languages like Korean and Japanese do not have individual probing operations of the T except for the [person] probing for the honorification cases, so that they do not allow the agreement on the verb, but do the late full-phi Agree to determine the u[Case] of the noun alone. It will be argued that Case feature is distinct from phi-features in that Case feature cannot undergo the feature-copy procedure, unlike phi-features.

This paper aims to discuss the demise and shift of phi-features in English pronouns, in particular, THEY used as a 3rd person, singular, non-binary, and gender-neutral pronoun. It has been argued that pronouns have been considered as a hybrid category between functional and lexical (Zimman 2016, Gelderen 2017). As recent as Dec., 2019, a singular-they has attracted much attention from linguists, journalists, and grammarians in the world, for the obvious reasons that the English language officially selected the epicene-they (Balhorn 2004) as Word of the Year (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). The surge of the word THEY as a non-binary (ungendered) singular pronoun is extremely engaging in one hand, while the morphosyntactic consequences of its novel form seem quite murky and nebulous, especially from a heuristic perspective such as an EFL/ESL context. It is argued in this paper that pronouns, belonging to “a weaker category”, are more susceptible to their morphosyntactic changes whose recent appearance as a singular-THEY is the consequence of such weakness and instability in their feature matrix. The changes of the phi-features, particularly gender and number features in singular-THEY, are due to the language usage of the speakers’ level of participation in this grammatical change, as well as to the diversity of sociolinguistic environment.