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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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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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 24 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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