Heidi Harley
In MITWPL 21, Papers on Phonology and Morphology, ed. by Andrew Carnie, Heidi Harley and Tony Bures, pp. 289-320
Publication year: 1994

I show that the feature-geometrical approach to morphology defines a notion of complexity from which the rule-ordering effects of Noyer’s hierarchy can be derived, as well as determining which features in a given filter will be Impoverished. These properties then fall out from the representation, rather than a completely separate metric for determining relative “weight”, or markedness. Further, a feature-geometrical approach is suggested by certain cross-linguistic groupings of morphological features. Such groupings can never be more than coincidence in a framework that represents features as unorganized bundles rather than geometrically.