Edited by Sedigheh Moradi, Marcia Haag, Janie Rees-Miller and Andrija Petrovic
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 353] 2021
► pp. 41–54
Resolved gender agreement occurs with coordination structures where combinations of two distinct genders are resolved into a different gender value. I have studied a representative sample of languages to understand why only a few of the logically conceivable patterns of agreement are attested. Starting from an underlying hierarchy of gender, I have constructed a pointwise algebra to represent various gender combinations. The gender hierarchy is directly extracted from the organization of the typological data. Combining abstract algebra and the mathematical notion of monotonicity helps us understand the restricted set of attested patterns to only allow monotonic mappings from the base hierarchy to output forms.