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What are linguistic features, and how do they manifest themselves in natural languages? The Georgian language provides a particularly acute set of challenges to linguists in the way it questions received assumptions about grammatical functions, thematic relations, and natural language categorization. This dissertation tackles these facts by examining first what the evidence for different domains of grammar are in Georgian. How do data from Georgian verb morphology challenge traditional assumptions underlying lexical incremental assumptions behind the morpheme? Do inversion facts argue for monostratal or multistratal conceptualizations of grammatical functions? The answer to both of these questions is highly complicated, and requires an extensive look at the Georgian systems of case, agreement, tense, aspect, and modality. In particular I assess the viability of classical treatments such as Harris (1982), Anderson (1993), Marantz (1992), and Stump (2001) and find that Georgian poses problems for each one. I go on to assess in the second part how differential feature hierarchies in morphology versus syntax argue for the existence of distinct feature geometries. Feature hierarchies, it turns out, are epiphenomena of set-theoretical properties of these geometries. In the last chapter, I discuss the literature on feature hierarchies arguing how many scholars have misunderstood this highly abstract area of grammatical theorizing.
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