French presents a challenge to single feature gender analyses. For animate nouns natural sex is often realized instead of grammatical gender. Also, the sex and gender of epicene nouns – animates with fixed gender that allow no morphological representation of sex – can conflict. I argue for a two feature analysis, following Kramer’s (2009) proposal for Amharic: one feature on n that represents natural sex and another on the root that represents grammatical gender. Utilizing elements from Distributed Morphology (DM) including licensing conditions and a version of agree (Pesetsky & Torrego 2007), this analysis is shown to account for all of the problematic French data.
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Kihm, Alain. 2005. “Noun Class, Gender, and the Lexicon-syntax-morphology Interfaces: A Comparative Study of Niger-Congo and Romance Languages”. The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Syntax ed. by Guglielmo Cinque & Richard S. Kayne, 459–512. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kramer, Ruth. 2009. Definite Markers, Phi-feature, and Agreement: A Morphosyntactic Investigation of the Amharic DP. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz.
Lowenstamm, Jean. 2008. “On Little N, √, and Types of Nouns”. Sounds of Silence: Empty Elements in Syntax and Phonology ed. by Jutta Hartmann, Veronika Hegedüs & Henk C. van Riemsdijk, 105–143. Oxford & Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Pesetsky, David & Esther Torrego. 2007. “The Syntax of Valuation and the Interpretability of Features”. Phrasal and Clausal Architecture: Syntactic Derivation and Interpretation ed. by Simin Karimi, Vida Samiian & Wendy K. Wilkins, 262–294. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
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Ritter, Elizabeth. 1993. “Where’s Gender?” Linguistic Inquiry 24:4.795–803.
2016. The location of gender features in the syntax. Language and Linguistics Compass 10:11 ► pp. 661 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 22 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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