Uninterpretable features are incompatible in morphology with other minimalist postulates

In recent work, Manzini and Savoia (2001, 2002a, 2002b, 2004a, 2004b, in press) argue that accounting for variation across Romance dialects, specifically Italian and Swiss ones, requires a reform of the morphological set {person, number, gender, case}. Comparison with the different data set offered by Albanian dialects (Manzini and Savoia 1999, 2003) confirms this conclusion. In a nutshell, the proposed reform is that syntax and morphology should run on the same categories, namely syntactic categories like N, Q, D etc to the exclusion of the traditional morphological feature set. Thus linguistic structures are articulated by the merger of lexical items that project such categories both at the phrase (syntactic) level and at the word (morphological) level.