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HandWiki. Phi Features. Encyclopedia. Available online: https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/31454 (accessed on 13 October 2026).
HandWiki. Phi Features. Encyclopedia. Available at: https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/31454. Accessed October 13, 2026.
HandWiki. "Phi Features" Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/31454 (accessed October 13, 2026).
HandWiki. (2022, October 26). Phi Features. In Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/31454
HandWiki. "Phi Features." Encyclopedia. Web. 26 October, 2022.
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In linguistics, especially within generative grammar, phi features (denoted with the Greek letter φ 'phi') are the semantic features of 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). Several other features are included in the set of phi-features, such as the categorical features ±N (nominal) and ±V (verbal), which can be used to describe lexical categories and case features. Phi-features are often thought of as the "silent" features that exist on lexical heads (or, according to some theories, within the syntactic structure) that are understood for number, gender, person or reflexivity. Due to their silent nature, phi-features are often only understood if someone is a native speaker of a language, or if the translation includes a gloss of all these features. Many languages exhibit a pro-drop phenomenon which means that they rely on other lexical categories to determine the phi-features of the lexical heads.
lexical categories
semantic features
categorical features
References
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