Ruth Kramer

The morphosyntax of gender

1. Introduction 2. The Amharic gender system and previous approaches to gender 3. An n analysis of gender 4. Defining gender 5. Case study 1: Two genders, three ns 6. Case study 2: Adding an uninterpretable gender feature 7. Case study 3: Three genders 8. Gender is not on Num: Evidence from Somali and Romanian 9. Gender and nominalizations 10. The highest gender wins and the interaction of gender and declension class 11. Conclusion

The location of gender features in the syntax

The goal of this paper is to critically review the results of linguistic research on the syntactic location of gender features. It has become relatively clear that gender features do not project their own phrase “GenP” and they are not located on the Num(ber) head that hosts number features. Instead, the field mostly agrees that gender features are located on the nominal—either on N or, in approaches that decompose lexical categories, on the nominalizing head n. Additional gender features have been proposed higher in the structure in order to capture certain processes that impose their own gender (e.g., diminutives are always feminine in the Semitic language Amharic) and to capture patterns of hybrid agreement (e.g., Russian nouns that are grammatically masculine but may trigger feminine agreement when referring to a woman).

A Split Analysis of Plurality: Number in Amharic

Plural morphemes are conventionally analyzed as realizations of Num-(ber). However, much recent research has investigated idiosyncratic/‘‘lexical’’ plural systems where some or all of the plural morphemes are realizations of some other syntactic head. The focus of this article is the intricate plural system of Amharic (Ethiosemitic), where there is considerable evidence that plural morphology is split between two heads: Num and the nominalizing head n. The article thus provides further empirical evidence that the morphosyntax of plurality does not involve Num alone; it also develops a novel analysis of a plural system that relies on two different morphosyntactic heads.