inherent features

A term used in some MODELS of GENERATIVE GRAMMAR to refer to one of the types of (BINARY) FEATURES which are contained in a LEXICAL entry (the others being CONTEXTUAL and RULE features) Inherent features provide information about the essential characteristics of an ITEM likely to affect its SYNTACTIC functioning, e.g. [+human], [+abstract], [+male]. They are involved at several points in an analysis, e.g. in specifying SELECTIONAL restrictions and in some non-lexical TRANSFORMATIONS.