Talk:Phi features
Add topic | This article is rated Stub-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||
| |||||||||||
Problem with the section on case
[edit]The section on case says
"French se is used to express reflexivity for every expression of the third person, regardless of gender or person."
This is contradictory. Se is only used with third person, so it's not "regardless of person." Maybe a better example would be South Slavic svoj or Mandarin ziji which are actually used for all persons?
(also there's a mismatch between "themselves" in the text and "theirselves" in the table earlier in the section)
Faulty English case diagram?
[edit]In section Case, the table of English personal pronouns uses the archaic form "theirselves" and has an empty cell (should have "its") in the "it" row.
In this table, 3rd-person male is bolded for being irregular, but in modern English, the pattern of basing the reflexive form on the accusative is shared between all 3rd-person personal pronouns.--85.81.43.69 (talk) 15:50, 10 January 2021 (UTC)
Edits and Content Addition
[edit]Hello, all. I am part of a group and we will be providing structural edits and adding new content to this page over the next several weeks mostly focused on the Locus of Phi Features section. This is part of a course-based activity of a 3rd year syntax course, and we anticipate having completed our edits by the end of December. We would appreciate any and all constructive comments and suggestions about how to improve the overall quality of this article. Thank you! Ophiuchus-Serpens (talk) 22:35, 25 November 2021 (UTC)
source for "cases" being phi features?
[edit]This didn't make sense to me while building a table that shows how cases combine with Person, Number, and Gender to yield different morphemes of determiners in German. So I tried to prove or disprove it... and failed. Help?
It is definitely NOT on page 2 of the source cited. https://books.google.de/books?hl=en&lr=&id=cJagGHOlKDUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA2 The title of the source cited is a list that doesn't include cases. But page 1 of the source cited includes a list that 1. I honestly didn't understand in part because 2. it seems to include everything: cases, verbs, nouns, gender, etc. If phi-features are just ALL THE FEATURES OF LANGUAGE, then it seems like a very un-useful name/concept, and also seems to not match the first sentence of this article.
The source for the first sentence of this article seems to be mis-attributing a description of "Agreement" as a description of "phi features" and ending up with what might be a kind of half-explanation of phi features. "Agreement is a phenomenon in natural language in which the form of one word or morpheme covaries with the form of another word or phrase in the sentence." https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199772810/obo-9780199772810-0118.xml Phi Features are talked about in a separate section of that paper, which I could not read due to barrier. But isn't phi features the information these variations convey, the reason why they morphemes are changing, how you know which way to vary one to match the other? It's not the morphology itself. That would be phonetics or something, not grammar. ...right? I'm so confused.
At a minimum, the sources need to be better cited. It's also very possible that this article incorrectly presents cases as phi features multiple times after incorrectly defining phi features twice.
I'm hoping that "phi features" does mean "Number, Person, and Gender" (and maybe some other features that can trigger morphology, but NOT cases), because that is the concept I am looking for. In order to find the right determiner for a substantive in German, you have to know 2 things: 1. the case (and you get to pick exactly one of 4 options) 2. the other features: number, person, and gender. Which combine into 1 property such as 3rd person singular female vs. 2nd person plural (German doesn't have plural genders) The name of the second one is Phi Features isn't it? If the name of the second group distinct from the first group is not "phi features", what is it and can we format this article to mention THAT concept?
When I tried to look this up in German I didn't encounter this confusion. For exmple, on slide 42/43 here https://home.uni-leipzig.de/muellerg/mu130b.pdf phi features are explicitly separate from case features. Does that mean that phi features means what I want it to mean? I'm not sure of anything anymore. I emailed that German professor and his colleague at Uni Leipzig about it and will check back here if they ever answer. Flasher702 (talk) 13:12, 4 February 2026 (UTC)