Abstract
Morphosyntactic features are a difficult challenge for the typologist. It is argued that the way to distinguish canonical morphosyntactic features is through their interaction with canonical parts of speech. This is defined through four criteria. The deviations from them help to characterize several problems involved with feature systems. The main result is that number can, in certain languages, come very close to being canonical. Gender, person, and case are defined in turn as showing deviations from the fully canonical situation.