The importance of features and exponents: Dissolving Feature Reassembly

Abstract

Formal approaches tobi-and multilingual grammars rely on two important claims: (i)the grammatical architecture should be able to deal withmonoandbi-/multilingual data without any specific constraints for the latter, (ii)features play a pivotal role in accounting for patterns across and within grammars. In the present paper, it is argued that an exoskeletal approach to grammar, which clearly distinguishes between the underlying syntactic features and their morphophonological realizations (exponents), offers an ideal tool to analyze data frombi-and multilingual speakers. Specifically, it is shown that this framework can subsume the specific mechanism of Feature Reassemblydeveloped by Donna Lardiere since the late 1990’s. Three case studies involving different languages and language combinations are offered in support of this claim, demonstrating how an exoskeletal approach can be employed without any additional constraints or mechanisms.