Eckhard Bick - VISL

‘+ uninferable positive feature
+ inferable positive feature
. uninferrable negative feature
(empty) inferable negative feature
Within the particular prototype/feature bundle ( [institution], row 3) and (
[town], [country], row 4), +CONCRETE/ENTITY and +HUMAN
EXPRESSION can be inferred from +HUM, while +HUM itself and the other
remaining positive feature (+LOCATION) are uninferrable in the sense, that there is no
feature in the bundle representing a superset of bundles for the +HUM or +LOCATION
bundle sets. Among the bundle’s negative features, -ANIMATE (living) and -
MOVABLE, for example, cannot be inferred, while –MOVE can be inferred once –
MOVABLE is given. What distinguishes the prototype bundles in row 3 and 4, is the
±COUNTABLE feature (N), since human settlement words like cidade (‘town’), aldeia
(‘village’) and bantustão (‘banana republic’) are countable 221 , while institutions are not:
a polícia (‘the police’ - which in Portuguese can’t mean ‘the officers’). Actually,
institution words used in the plural (i.e. as +COUNTABLE) often switch to the
prototype category of (‘building’, row 9), loosing the +HUM and +X features in
the proces.
221 In the prototype scheme, uman settlement nouns behave somewhat like nouns denoting individual humans (with the
additional feature of fixed location). Thus, human settlement nouns can have names, and as such, become members of
another morphological PoS class, making singular form a lexeme category.
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