PhD in Theoretical and Experimental Linguistics (TEL)
June 29, 2026, 11:00 am – 13:00 am CEST
Prof. Roberta D’Alessandro - ILS Utrecht – Utrecht University
AGREEMENT AND FEATURE BUNDLES:
THE VIEW FROM HERITAGE LANGUAGES
Introduced by:
Andrea Moro & Matteo Greco (IUSS Pavia)
Roberta D'Alessandro is the Chair Professor of Linguistics (Syntax and Language Variation) and the Head of the Linguistics Division at Utrecht University. Her primary research focuses on theoretical syntax, with a specific emphasis on how language contact shapes grammar inminority and heritage languages. Beyond theoretical linguistics, she co-authored the Dutch Code of Conduct for Research Integrity. Additionally, she advises the European Commission
through Joint Research Centre (JRC) initiatives and serves on the International Science Council (ISC) Committee for Freedom and Responsibility in Science. She founded the Heritage Language Syntax platform. She is Editor-in-Chief of Isogloss and she is series co-editor of Language Science Press's Open Generative Syntax. She also founded Your Academic Auntie.
In her talk, Professor D’Alessandro will examine the foundational assumptions surrounding features and agreement within the generative tradition. It is usually assumed that there are at
least two sets of features (with or without overlap; see Zeijlstra 2008 ff.): semantic features and formal features. Formal features, or φ-features, are those that undergo agreement and may drive syntactic computation (Chomsky 2001 ff.). φ-features are organized according to a feature geometry (Harley & Ritter 2002), which determines an implicational scale for agreement. Since the advent of Distributed Morphology, it has generally been assumed that their morphological realization does not take place in the syntax. In other words, morphology is the exponence assigned to the featural output of a syntactic operation, namely Agree (Chomsky 1995 ff). In addition, φ-features are usually organized into bundles, and a growing body of work argues that the internal ordering of these bundles is responsible for microvariation (see for instance Coon & Keine 2021). This talk examines these assumptions by addressing the following questions: Are feature bundles universally clustered? Are person, number, gender, and perhaps case and noun class the only relevant features for Agree? How should we account for semantic agreement in person, number, and gender with a referent? And is Agree really independent of morphology? Professor D’Alessandro will present a number of case studies, primarily from heritage languages, showing that the inventory of φ-features is insufficient to describe the agreement patterns we find, for instance in honorifics (Italian and heritage Hindi in the UK will be discussed), where referent-oriented features display a syntactic behavior distinct from that of pure φ-features. Furthermore, different language pairings will be shown to yield different results with respect to feature bundling and different methodologies will be shown to produce different, and sometimes conflicting, outcomes (HSpanish in the US and HCatalan in the Netherlands will be considered). Finally, on the basis of HTamil in Delhi it will be shown that Agree is a syntactic operation and as such very different from morphological/word formation operations.
Zoom Link:
https://iusspavia.zoom.us/my/br.salariunioni
For further information:
asya.zanollo@iusspavia.it, guido.formichi@iusspavia.it, matteo.greco@iusspavia.it
Locandina_IUSS_Ling_2026_Villalba-1.pdf
Locandina_IUSS_Ling_2026_D’Alessandro-1.pdf