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Related concepts (22)
Phi features
In linguistics, especially within generative grammar, phi features (denoted with the Greek letter φ 'phi') are the morphological expression of a semantic process in which a word or morpheme varies with the form of another word or phrase in the same sentence. This variation can include person, number, gender, and case, as encoded in pronominal agreement with nouns and pronouns (the latter are said to consist only of phi-features, containing no lexical head).
Redundancy (linguistics)
In linguistics, a redundancy is information that is expressed more than once. Examples of redundancies include multiple agreement features in morphology, multiple features distinguishing phonemes in phonology, or the use of multiple words to express a single idea in rhetoric. Redundancy may occur at any level of grammar. Because of agreement – a requirement in many languages that the form of different words in a phrase or clause correspond with one another – the same semantic information may be expressed several times.