This book presents a critical overview of current work on linguistic features - gender, number, case, person, etc. - and establishes new bases for their use in the study and understanding of language. It brings together perspectives from phonology to formal syntax and semantics, expounding features in typology, computer applications, and logic.

• 1: Anna Kibort and Greville G. Corbett: Introduction


• Part 1: Key Notions


• 2: Greville G. Corbett: Features: essential notions


• 3: B. Elan Dresher: Feature hierarchies and contrast in phonology


• 4: Anna Kibort: Towards a typology of grammatical features


• Part II: Perspectives From Syntactic Description and Theory


• 5: Keith Plaster and Maria Polinsky: Features in categorization, or a new look at an old problem


• 6: Gabi Danon: The definiteness feature at the syntax-semantics interface


• 7: Gergana Popova: Features in periphrastic constructions


• 8: David Adger: A Minimalist theory of feature structure


• Part III: Formal Perspectives


• 9: Ann Copestake and Dan Flickinger: Features and computational semantics


• 10: Ivan A. Sag: Feature geometry and predictions of locality


• 11: Geoffrey K. Pullum and Hans-Jörg Tiede: Inessential features and expressive power of descriptive metalanguages

Anna Kibort is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Linguistics, University of Cambridge, and Visiting Researcher in the Surrey Morphology Group, University of Surrey. Her research interests are in morphosyntax and linguistic typology. She is a contributing author in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences, edited by Patrick Hogan (forthcoming).
Greville Corbett is Distinguished Professor of Linguistics, University of Surrey. He is the editor, along with Bernard Comrie, of The Slavonic Languages (Routledge 1993) and author of Gender (CUP 1991), Number (CUP 2000), Agreement (CUP 2006), and The Syntax-Morphology Interface: a study of syncretism, along with Matthew Baerman and Dunstan Brown (CUP 2005).