Productivity vs predictability

The nominal gender distinction in Algonquian languages known as Animate versus Inanimate has long been observed to correlate closely with semantic animacy, even as superficially ‘unpredictable’ Animates at first suggest an ultimately formal and rote-lexicalized character. In Chapter 12, drawing on data from four Northeastern-area Eastern Algonquian languages, the author shows that Animate assignment is neither purely formal-lexicalized, nor based on a single elusive shared semantic feature, but instead is an emergent phenomenon: a mutable, ongoing lexicon-structuring process that builds up a set of lexical-semantic ‘families’ to which AN status is assigned. This is seen most strikingly in Passamaquoddy-Maliseet and Mi’kmaw speakers’ robust knowledge of the gender assignment of novel items and foreign words, with similar patterns seen in Penobscot and Western Abenaki corpora. Language-internally, the phenomena of ‘dual animacy’ and ‘variable animacy’ also support this view, as does the observation that Animate assignment appears to change diachronically across Algonquian by semantic cluster, i.e. by ‘family’, rather than by individual lexeme. Establishing that the phenomenon is dynamically synchronically productive (and far more predictable than not), the author aims to encourage further research in this heretofore neglected area, and so also presents preliminary questions about the falsifiability of the model and what adequate semantic and syntactic accounts would require, and finally observes how this new line of investigation might substantially help Algonquian language reclamation/revitalization efforts.

Number, names, and animacy

Chapter 10 identifies three distinct types of noun classification active in Gitksan: mass/count, animate/inanimate, and common/determinate. It further identifies three types of number contrast each conditioned by a specific noun class; these are additive, pronominal, and associative plurals, respectively. These plurals, particularly the additive and associative plural, are shown to differ from each other in both their syntax and semantics. The author locates each of the three pairs of noun class and number contrasts in a distinct functional projection, from a nominal AspP, to φ‎P, to DP. By doing so, the chapter provides insight into the articulated projections that make up the Gitksan nominal spine, and exemplifies the variability that noun classes and number contrasts may have even within the grammar of a single language.

Multiple facets of constructional Arabic gender and ‘functional universalism’ in the DP

Rather than being confined to an intrinsic nominal property (of the low n), and expressing sex or animacy, gender is shown to be polysemous, contributing ‘unorthodox’ meanings such as quantity, perspective, evaluation, performativity, and interacting with various layers and categories in the nominal domain. It is then constructional, and distributed over the various syntactic projections, including RootP, nP, DivP, GroupP, and SAP (Speech Act Phrase). Appealing to data from Arabic varieties shows that gender plays the same role played by classifiers in South Asian classifier languages. Two alternating (and equivalent) modes of unitization are used in forming individual units or groups: (a) morphological gender builds singulatives or pluratives, and (b) pseudo-partitives contribute semi-lexical classifier structures. Close interactions between gender, classifier, and number (in addition to other interactions) make it difficult to account for linguistic variation through traditional typologies, and open the room for a more appropriate ‘functional universalism’.

On gender agreement in Brazilian Portuguese

The aim of Chapter 7 is to provide a unified analysis of gender licensing in Brazilian Portuguese. It proposes a mechanism of feature relativization in the Preminger sense (2014) to address the different syntactic patterns of gender agreement in the language. Preminger’s core idea is to deal with φ‎-agreement obligatoriness even in contexts in which it seems not to occur. The proposal points out that the different outcomes for gender are due to underspecification of the structure of the DP that contains this feature, and its combination with other features available in the inventory results in different interpretations in LF, which, in addition, may predict generalizations such as the option of default agreement as a predictable phenomenon in grammar.

Plural marking on mass nouns

Mass nouns are generally incompatible with plural morphology in number-marking languages. Greek mass nouns, though, can freely pluralize. Chapter 11 shows that the meaning of plural mass nouns in Greek is that of ‘spread over a surface in a disorderly way’. The author argues that plural morphology on mass nouns in the language is the spell-out of number features on the nominalizing head n, unlike plural morphology on count nouns, which spells out the head of the functional projection NumP. She extends this analysis to other languages with plural marking on mass nouns, and argues that plural morphology on mass nouns is never the spellout of features on Num, which can only have the meaning associated with regular plural morphology on count nouns cross-linguistically.

A novel kind of gender syncretism

Cross-linguistically, gender is often syncretic in the plural, that is, plural forms typically do not make gender distinctions. However, Chapter 8 focuses on a little-studied type of syncretism where ‘plural’ agreement is syncretic with the singular agreement associated with a particular gender. Specifically, plural masculine and feminine nouns alike trigger the agreement patterns of masculine singular nouns. Using data from Maay, Amharic, and Haro, an analysis of this syncretism is developed in Distributed Morphology and evidence is provided against an alternative analysis in which these plural nouns would have masculine gender in the syntax. Since Distributed Morphology makes restrictive predictions about possible syncretisms, it is shown how it is a positive result that it predicts exactly this type of syncretism. Overall, the chapter advances our understanding of gender and number by analysing a novel gender-number syncretism and presents a case study of how to distinguish morphological and syntactic effects.

Categorization as noun construction

Chapter 3 articulates a proposal about how syntax encodes the fundamental parameters of noun lexical semantics: entity type, part structure, atomicity, and numerosity, represented at different syntactic loci. It is claimed that the naming (not describing) of an entity type is what makes a noun a noun—more precisely, what turns a root into a noun. An ‘entity type’ is understood as an e-type element in the speaker’s ontology, not yet determined as denoting over kinds or their object instances. Higher projections turn this into a predicate, and further grammatical specifications may restrict the part structure of its denotation domain. Whether the reference is to kinds or to instances depends jointly on all these specifications. In particular, plurality in some cases (waters) enforces an instance reading where the partition it determines is based on spatiotemporally situated parts, in the absence of other criteria for individuality. Besides determining what types of plurals may not license a kind reading, this view of the division of reference analyses fake mass nouns (furniture) as a count structure inside a mass shell, relating their semantics to their morphology. The same analytical framework, with no additional stipulations, accounts for the properties of non-countable plural nouns. Finally, a type of mixed-gender DP which cannot be pluralized suggests that the attribution of a gender value can strongly constrain the determination of part structure.

How to phraseologize nominal number

Lithuanian nouns inflect for singular and plural. However, a subset of deverbal nouns with nominalizer –yb- deviate from the pattern. Some nouns inflect just for singular. Other nouns inflect just for plural. The contrast in these deverbal nouns is due to (i) heterogeneity of the verbs that -yb- attaches to; (ii) idiomaticity of inflectional nominal number. Chapter 13 argues that the fixed number specifications on the non-ambiguous cases are instances of morpheme level idiomaticity. The data and the discussion bear on whether the commonly assumed distinction between derivation and inflection holds.

The double life of gender and its structural consequences

Chapter 6 investigates variation in the domain of gender in Italian. The Standard Italian nominal system morphologically marks two distinct genders, three distinct nominal classes (idiosyncratic nominal endings), and two numbers, a combination which lends itself to a theoretical investigation of complex gender interactions. Crucially, Italian nominal inflection also distinguishes between grammatical, i.e. idiosyncratic, and natural, i.e. context-dependent, gender. The chapter argues that while some nouns come with gender determined from the lexicon, others may get their gender valued only via the context. Such a contextual valuation may arise only at the phase level, with D being the locus of such a valuation. Evidence comes from agreement and derivational morphology.

Limiting gender

Grammatical gender features, which are seen as having both a semantic and arbitrary form, have been argued to embody the interpretable-uninterpretable distinction: semantic gender is interpretable, and arbitrary gender is uninterpretable (Kramer 2014, 2015). Using French as a case study, Chapter 5 argues that all gender features (even those which have been seen as arbitrary) are necessarily interpretable at the LF interface. Even if a feature does not contribute compositionally to the meaning of a structure, it must be visible to provide the context for interpretation. This leads to an argument for the abandonment of the interpretable-uninterpretable distinction in the representation of features. Instead, the analysis contends that the mechanism of interpretation is responsible for differences in the semantic contribution of features: both heads and sub-structures can be taken as input to the interpretive mechanism. The interpretation of heads leads to compositional meaning, and the interpretation of sub-structures to non-compositional meaning. The system has the consequence of simplifying restrictions on gender specification such that they are solely linked to the availability of a semantic interpretation, rather than to a combination of phonological and semantic licensing conditions.