Many languages contain nouns that seem to have different genders in the singular and in the plural. In this paper, we investigate two languages with this kind of “ambigeneric” noun: Romanian (Romance; Romania) and Guébie (Kru; Côte d’Ivoire). Romanian is well-known for its ambigeneric nouns, traditionally referred to as neuter, but ambigeneric nouns in Guébie have not been previously studied. While Guébie is unrelated to Romanian, and its gender system is based on different features, the ambigeneric nouns in the two languages are strikingly similar. Building on the analysis of Romanian in
Many languages contain nouns that seem to have different genders in the singular and in the plural (see e.g.,
Although it is not uncommon for a language to have ambigeneric nouns, the details vary across languages. For example, there is variation in whether many nouns are ambigeneric (yes: Sidaama (
In this paper, we examine two languages with this kind of “challenging” ambigeneric noun: Romanian (Romance; Romania) and Guébie (Kru; Côte d’Ivoire). Romanian is well-known for its ambigeneric nouns, traditionally referred to as neuter nouns; they have been the subject of linguistic research for decades (from at least
Building on the analysis of Romanian in
We begin in Section 2 by walking through the Romanian ambigeneric pattern and introducing Kramer’s (
In this section, we present Romanian ambigeneric nouns as well as the key components of
There are three patterns of nominal agreement in Romanian: feminine (1), masculine (2), and neuter (3).
(1)
a.
casă
house
frumoas-ă
beautiful-
‘beautiful house’
b.
case
houses
beautiful-
‘beautiful houses’
(2)
a.
trandafir
rose
beautiful-
‘beautiful rose’
b.
trandafiri
roses
frumoş-i
beautiful-
‘beautiful roses’
(3)
a.
palton
coat
beautiful-
‘beautiful coat’
b.
paltoane
coats
beautiful-
‘beautiful coats’ ((1)-(3):
Neuter nouns are ambigeneric: they trigger masculine agreement in the singular (
Perhaps accordingly, Romanian ambigeneric nouns have been the focus of much previous research (see e.g.,
In this paper, we adopt this perspective as well: the Romanian ambigeneric pattern is a kind of non-natural class syncretism. We follow Kramer (
To start, Kramer (
(4)
a.
Feminine:
b.
Masculine:
c.
Ambigeneric:
In the Romanian lexicon,
Given the gender features in (4), Kramer (
(5)
a.
b.
c.
d.
[+
[ ]
[–
[+
↔ -ă
↔ -Ø
↔ -i
↔ -e
Because ambigeneric nouns lack gender features, they must trigger insertion of (5)b in the singular like masculine nouns and (5)d in the plural like feminine nouns. (4) and (5) thus suffice to capture the ambigeneric noun agreement syncretism.
However, as Matushansky (
(6)
a.
o
a.
femeie
woman
‘a woman’
b.
two.
femei
woman.
‘two women’
(7)
a.
a.
bărbat
man
‘a man’
b.
doi
two.
bărbaţi
man.
‘two men’
(8)
a.
a.
glas
voice
‘a voice’
b.
two.
glas-uri
voice-
‘two voices’ ((6)-(8):
The list of agreement targets in Romanian includes various determiners, demonstratives, numerals, certain verbal forms, and adjectives, and all of them show the same ambigeneric pattern with neuter nouns (
In order to capture the metasyncretism of Romanian ambigeneric noun agreement, we use the Distributed Morphology operation Impoverishment (this idea was originally proposed in a handout (
(9)
[gender]
→
Ø / [plural]
The result is that all plural agreement feature bundles lack gender features, and thus gender cannot affect Vocabulary Insertion for plural agreement feature bundles.
Returning now to Romanian, we propose two Impoverishment operations to account for the ambigeneric agreement. In singular feature bundles, the masculine feature is deleted via Impoverishment, (10).
(10)
[–
[–
→
[–
After (10) operates, masculine and ambigeneric agreement feature bundles are identical, and thus they both must be exponed using the same Vocabulary Item, regardless of the kind of agreement (adjectival, demonstrative, etc.). To take a specific example, the Vocabulary Items for singular adjectival inflection are in (11).
(11)
a.
b.
[+
[ ]
↔ -ă
↔ -Ø
Since [–
In the plural, an Impoverishment operation removes the feminine feature, (12):
(12)
[+
[+
→
[+
The Vocabulary Items for plural adjectival inflection are in (13).
(13)
a.
b.
[+
[+
The Impoverishment operation renders ambigeneric and feminine featurally identical no matter what Vocabulary Item is ultimately inserted. For adjectival inflection, (13)b must be inserted for both.
There is an additional benefit to the Impoverishment analysis. As Matushansky (
Overall, the gender features and Vocabulary Items proposed in Kramer (
In this section, we provide some background on Guébie and its gender system (Section 3.1), and then briefly lay out the analysis of the gender system in
Guébie (iso: gie) is a Kru language spoken in Côte d’Ivoire, and the data presented here come from a corpus collected between 2013 and 2022, with native speakers of the language in the US, Canada, and Côte d’Ivoire. It is closely related to other previously described Kru languages, in particular Vata and Dida Lakota (
In Guébie, human nouns and non-human nouns trigger different agreement markers on adjectives and pronouns (
(14)
a.
ŋudi3.1
man
kad
big
‘a big/important man’
b.
ɓitə2.3
house
kad
big
‘a big house’
Given these agreement facts, we conclude, following Sande (
However, non-human nouns (both animals and inanimates) in fact trigger three different agreement patterns. There are no semantic commonalities within these three sub-classes: animals, body parts, liquids, small and big entities, etc. are found in all three classes (
(15)
a.
ɟe42
egg
kad
big
‘a big egg’
b.
to3
battle
kad
big
‘a big battle’
The mapping between ten possible noun-final vowels and their corresponding agreement markers is shown in
Phonological Agreement Correlations (
[i, ɪ, e, ɛ] | Front | ɛ/e |
[ə, a] | Central | a/ə |
[u, ʊ, o, ɔ] | Back | ʊ/u |
The same pattern shown in
(16)
ɔ3
3.
‘he/she’ (
Non-human pronouns, though, can take three different forms depending on the backness of the final vowel of the antecedent, as shown in
3rd Person Singular Nominative Pronouns (
ɔ3 | ɛ3, a3, ʊ3 |
The pattern in
3rd Person Singular Accusative Pronouns (
ɔ2 | ɛ2, a2, ʊ2 |
Many Kru languages show this kind of phonologically-determined gender agreement (
Definite-Marked Nouns (
ɲu4 | ɲu4=a4 | a3, *ʊ3 | ‘water’ |
jigo3.1 | jigo3.1=a1 | a3, *ʊ3 | ‘fire’ |
ɟe42 | ɟe4=a2 | a3, *ɛ3 | ‘egg’ |
To summarize, Guébie has two grammatical genders: human and non-human. Singular human agreement markers have a set form, while singular non-human agreement markers take three different forms depending on the backness of the final vowel of the agreement controller or antecedent.
Sande (
In Sande’s approach, a morphosyntactic agreement operation first applies (either feature copying or Agree; the details do not matter) involving the morphosyntactic gender feature [+/–
(17)
a.
Human Pronoun
[
[–
[3]
[
b.
Non-human Pronoun
[
[–
[3]
[
The human pronoun is realized as /ɔ3/ = (18)a. For non-human pronouns, Sande (
(18)
a.
[
b.
[
The phonological features of (18)b are then determined via constraint interaction. Summarizing Sande’s analysis, the right edge of a noun and the right edge of an element that agrees with it stand in a correspondence relation (A
Overall, given Sande (
At first glance, the gender system in Guébie and the gender system in Romanian seem quite different. Romanian gender is based on a masculine/feminine distinction, whereas Guébie is based on a human/non-human distinction. Romanian assigns gender to some nouns arbitrarily (nouns denoting inanimate objects have masculine or feminine gender despite not being interpreted as male/female), whereas Guébie always assigns gender semantically (nouns denoting human beings have human gender, and all others have non-human gender). Finally, Guébie gender agreement is partially phonologically determined, whereas Romanian gender agreement is purely morphosyntactic. However, a closer look at plural nouns in Guébie reveals a deep similarity between the two gender systems.
In Guébie, human plural nouns trigger an
(19)
a.
ŋudi-ə3.1.2
man-
kad-a4.2
big-
‘important men’
b.
wa3
3.
‘they’
About half of the non-human plural nouns (43% in a corpus containing over 5000 nouns) show a distinct plural agreement marker: an -
(20)
a.
ɓi3.12
plate-
ɟɛlɪ1.1
red-
[ɓi3.12 ɟɛlɪ1.1]
‘red plates’
b.
ɪ3
3.
‘they’
However, the other half of non-human nouns (57%) trigger the same agreement as human plural nouns: an
(21)
a.
ɟe-ə4.2
egg-
kad-a4.2
big-
‘big eggs’
b.
wa3
3.
‘they’
Therefore, Guébie has ambigeneric nouns: nouns like ‘egg’ trigger
It is important to note that ambigeneric nouns in Guébie do not have any unique linguistic properties (they are not all animals, all fruits, all body parts, etc.), and they share no phonological or syntactic features exclusively with human nouns. There is no special interpretation triggered in the plural for ambigeneric nouns. Moreover, the ambigeneric nouns show the ambigeneric pattern consistently; across all the plural agreement paradigms in Guébie (
Plural Pronouns and Plural Adjectival Agreement.
wa3 | ɪ3 | wa3 | |
wa2 | ɪ2 | wa2 | |
wanɛ2.3 | ɪnɛ2.3 | wanɛ2.3 | |
waɓa3.2 | waɓa3.2 | ||
-a | -ɪ | -a |
The syncretism between human nouns and ambigeneric nouns in the plural is therefore the most challenging kind of ambigeneric pattern to explain (Section 1) and it is likely to be metasyncretic,
Overall, Guébie and Romanian both morphologically distinguish between two genders. However, they also each contain a set of nouns that systematically trigger agreement with one gender in the singular and the other gender in the plural, i.e., they both have ambigeneric nouns.
In this section, we develop a Distributed Morphology analysis of the ambigeneric nouns in Guébie along the lines of the analysis of Romanian in Section 2. To start, we propose Guébie has three types of
(22)
a.
Human nouns:
b.
Some non-human nouns:
c.
Ambigeneric:
Human nouns are formed with
To capture the syncretism of ambigeneric with non-human nouns in the singular and human in the plural, we use two Impoverishment operations that delete gender features from certain kinds of feature bundles, in exactly the same way as the analysis of Romanian in Section 2. In the singular, the non-human feature is deleted, (23).
(23)
[–
[–
→
[–
This ensures that non-human and ambigeneric agreement feature bundles are identical before Vocabulary Insertion, so they both must be exponed using the same Vocabulary Item. The Vocabulary Items for third-person singular nominative pronouns are in (24).
(24)
a.
D [+
b.
D [–
Non-human agreement and ambigeneric agreement will both require insertion of the phonologically and morphologically underspecified Vocabulary Item in (24)b.
In the plural, the human feature is deleted, (25).
(25)
[+
[+
→
[+
This ensures that human and ambigeneric agreement feature bundles are identical before Vocabulary Insertion in the plural. The Vocabulary Items for third-person plural nominative pronouns are in (26).
(26)
a.
D [–
b.
D [+
Thus, the ambigeneric pattern is explained: singular non-human pronouns and singular ambigeneric pronouns are realized with the same Vocabulary Item (24)b, and plural human pronouns and plural ambigeneric pronouns are both realized with the same Vocabulary Item (26)b.
An Impoverishment account renders ambigenerics in both Romanian and Guébie nearly identical in analysis, and it is also fully compatible with Sande’s (
In Section 4.1, we present and then argue against syntactic approaches and lexicalist approaches to ambigeneric nouns. In Sections 4.2 and 4.3, we discuss a recent Impoverishment-based analysis of Romanian (
In this section, we lay out two major previous approaches to ambigeneric nouns in Romanian: (i) a syntactic approach where the head of NumP has gender features, and (ii) a lexicalist approach where nouns are pre-syntactically assigned to agreement classes.
The syntactic approach to Romanian ambigeneric nouns is suggested in
(27)
a.
Num[–
b.
Num[–
c.
Num[+
d.
Num[+
(
Class I is thus the set of nouns traditionally called masculine, Class II is feminine, and Class III is ambigeneric since it is selected by Num[–
Adapting this approach to Guébie is straightforward. In Guébie, Num would be specified as [+
(28)
a.
Num[–
b.
Num[–
c.
Num[+
d.
Num[+
Class I would be non-human (and non-ambigeneric) nouns, Class II would be human nouns and Class III would be ambigeneric since it is selected for by Num[–
This analysis captures the ambigeneric patterns, but it has some unappealing properties. First, as Kramer (
Second, this approach makes an incorrect empirical prediction for coordinated nominals (as noticed by
(29)
a.
Nucul
walnut.
şi
and
prunul
plum.
sînt
are
uscaţi.
dry.
‘The walnut tree and the plum tree are dry.’
b.
Podeaua
floor.
şi
and
uşa
door.
sînt
are
albe.
white.
‘The floor and the door are white.’ (
(30)
a.
ŋwɔnɔ4.4
woman
(ɛ)ja3.1
and
ŋudi3.1
man
kɔ=a2.2
be.
ɓa2
there
e4
1
ni=
see.
jɔkʊ2.3
‘A man and a woman were there; I saw them.’
b.
ɓə31
plate
ɓɔlɔ2.2
one
ɛja3.1
and
selo2.3
bucket
kɔ=a2.2
be.
ɓa2
there
e4
1
ni=
see.
jɔkʊ2.3
‘A plate and a bucket were there; I saw them.’
In the syntactic analysis, when an ambigeneric noun is singular, it is selected by Num[–
(31)
Scaunul
chair.
şi
and
dulapul
cupboard.
sînt
are
albe.
white.
‘The chair and the cupboard are white.’ (
(32)
boti4.1
bottle
ɛja3.1
and
sɛpɪ2.4
cat
kɔ=a2.2
be.
ɓa2
there
e4
1
ni=
see.
jɔkʊ2.3
‘A bottle and a cat were there. I saw them.’
In the DM analysis, the feminine agreement in (31) and the human agreement in (32) are predicted to occur if we assume that there is a plural number feature on the agreement target (predicate adjective in Romanian, pronoun in Guébie). Since ambigeneric nouns are unspecified for gender features, (33)b
(33)
a.
b.
[–
[+
↔ -i
↔ -e
(34)
a.
b.
D [–
D [+
In contrast, in the syntactic analysis, even if the agreement target has a plural feature, the prediction is incorrect because the ambigeneric nouns (or more precisely: the Num heads that select ambigeneric nouns) have specified gender features ([–
Similar to the syntactic analysis, the lexicalist analysis relies on specified mappings between a nominal gender, a syntactic feature that determines agreement, and a specific number. However, it does not rely on syntactic selection to accomplish the mappings. We focus here on the lexicalist analysis developed in Bateman & Polinsky (
Specifically, nouns are assigned to one of four genders (A, B, C, D) based on their semantic or formal properties. The gender assignment rules for singular nouns are in (35).
(35)
a. Female-ness ➔ A
b. Male-ness ➔ B
c. End in
d. End in any other segment ➔ B
The semantic rules take precedence over the formal rules, so any non-female/male-denoting nouns ending in
(36)
a. Female-ness ➔ D
b. Male-ness ➔ C
c. End in
d. End in any other segment ➔ D
Non-female/male-denoting nouns with the plural suffix
Agreement marking is divided into two sets: Set I (traditional masculine) and Set II (traditional feminine). The genders are matched with agreement according to the rules in (37):
(37)
i.
ii.
iii.
iv.
A ➔ Set II, singular
B ➔ Set I, singular
C ➔ Set I, plural
D ➔ Set II, plural (
The combination of the gender assignment rules in (35) and (36) plus the agreement rules in (37) generate the patterns correctly for masculine nouns, feminine nouns, and ambigeneric nouns. For example, ambigeneric nouns do not denote males/females and do not end in
This analysis can be extended to Guébie ambigeneric nouns. The necessary gender assignment rules and agreement rules are in (38)–(40).
(38)
a.
b.
Human ➔ A
Non-human ➔ B
(39)
i. Human nouns ➔ D
ii. End in
iii. End in
(40)
i. A ➔ Set II, singular
ii. B ➔ Set I, singular
iii. C ➔ Set I, plural
iv. D ➔ Set II, plural
Gender assignment is semantic in the singular: human nouns are assigned to Class A and take Set II agreement, and non-human nouns are assigned to Class B and take Set I agreement. In the plural, human nouns are assigned to Class D and trigger Set II agreement (the same as in the singular). However, the remaining nouns (all of which are non-human) are assigned to a class based on their form: nouns that take the plural ending
While the analysis works in both Romanian and Guébie, it has several drawbacks. First, across both languages, the set of nouns assigned to each gender is coincidentally nearly identical across numbers. Specifically, the same set of nouns largely comprises Class A in the singular and Class D in the plural (human gender in Guébie, feminine gender in Romanian) and Class B in the singular / Class C in the plural (non-human in Guébie, masculine in Romanian). This is partially ensured through the semantic gender assignment rules, which apply in the same way to singular and plural nouns. However, this duplicates key semantic generalizations across numbers (male ➔ masculine, human ➔ human gender, etc.) that should only be stated once in the grammar. Moreover, in Romanian, it does not explain why nouns that are assigned to Class A formally (i.e., those that end in
Bateman & Polinsky (
The lexicalist analysis also overgenerates. In Romanian, recall that female-denoting nouns are assigned to Class A in the singular, and so are nouns that end in
In a DM analysis, these correlations between form and meaning are captured. In Romanian, both female-denoting nouns and nouns that are grammatically feminine have the feature [+
(41)
a.
b.
Num[+
Num[+
Overall, then, the lexicalist analysis cannot capture any generalizations that relate a noun with a semantically assigned gender to a particular formal marker, while the DM analysis does so easily.
Finally, like the syntactic analysis in Section 4.1.1, the lexicalist analysis also struggles to explain agreement with coordinated ambigeneric nouns. When two singular ambigeneric nouns are conjoined in either Romanian or Guébie, they have the same class (B: masculine/non-human) and should trigger agreement using Set I (masculine/non-human). However, as we have seen they in fact trigger agreement using Set II (feminine/human) in both Romanian in (31) and Guébie in (32).
Overall, then, both the syntactic and the lexicalist analyses face conceptual and empirical challenges in accounting for Romanian and Guébie ambigeneric nouns. We have argued that the Distributed Morphology analysis developed in this paper not only avoids these pitfalls, but also captures the relevant generalizations better. However, the DM analysis faces certain issues once a broader range of data from Romanian adjectives is considered, and this is the focus of the next section.
Matushansky (
The typical Romanian adjective makes four agreement distinctions: masculine/ambigeneric singular, feminine singular, masculine plural, and feminine/ambigeneric plural. The four exponents that most often correspond to these four distinctions are in
Typical Romanian Adjectival Inflection Paradigm.
-Ø/-u | -ă | ||
-i | -e |
Recall from Section 2 that we account for
(42)
a.
b.
c.
d.
[+
[ ] ↔ -Ø/-u
[–
[+
Feminine singular
Masculine/ambigeneric singular
Masculine plural
Feminine/ambigeneric plural
In (42),
M22 observes that several kinds of adjectives appear with only a subset of these Vocabulary Items, i.e., they display syncretisms. We focus on the three syncretic adjectival paradigms laid out in
Feminine Singular is
No Gender Distinctions:
mar-e | |||
mar-i |
No Gender Distinctions in the Plural & Fem Sg is
auri-u | auri-e | ||
auri-i |
(43)
a.
b.
c.
d.
[–
[–
[+
otherwise -e
Feminine singular
Default singular
Default plural
Default
This allows for the data in
(44)
[γ] ➔Ø/ __ [+
The resulting feature bundle consisting of just number features will be realized as (43)c, the plural default suffix
As for the distribution of the
(45)
[γ] ➔Ø/ __ [+
[#]
Similarly, when
(46)
[γ] ➔Ø/ __ [–
[#]
Overall, whenever an adjectival inflection marker has no phi features (i.e., after (45) and (46) apply), it will be realized as the suffix
The Vocabulary Items in (43) have an additional important consequence. Specifically, in (43)c,
To address this, M22 proposes that a feminine or ambigeneric plural adjective must undergo Impoverishment for both gender and number. This will correctly predict that the elsewhere/default item
Therefore, M22 adopts a different approach to gender features in Romanian, (47).
(47)
a.
Feminine:
b.
Masculine:
c.
Ambigeneric:
In this approach, there are two binary gender features: [+/–
(48)
[γ] ➔Ø/ __ [–
[#]
This rule removes the gender and number features from a feature bundle in the context of [–
As far as we can determine, M22 does not discuss the masculine/ambigeneric syncretism in the singular. However, because the masculine/ambigeneric syncretism is a metasyncretism, it needs to be captured with Impoverishment. In M22’s approach, this could take the form of (49):
(49)
[γ] ➔Ø/ __ [–
This rule causes masculine and ambigeneric singular agreement targets to be featurally identical (reduced to [–
In order to capture the feminine/ambigeneric plural syncretism described in Section 2, M22 posits two gender features in Romanian (see (47)). While the key empirical generalizations are still fresh in the reader’s mind, we show here that our analysis can be extended to address
First, the Vocabulary Items proposed in Section 2 can be retooled so that
(50)
a.
b.
c.
d.
[+
[–
[–
elsewhere↔ -e
Feminine singular
Masculine/ambigeneric singular
Masculine plural
Feminine/ambigeneric plural
Combined with the Impoverishment operations in (45) and (46), this modification renders our analysis and M22 equal in empirical coverage with respect to the distribution of
Second, the plural suffix
(51)
This suffix still expones plural number, but it now is inserted in a context that includes either the morphosyntactic feature [–
There are no adverse empirical consequences that we can see to this modification. Moreover, it is common in DM for Vocabulary Insertion to be conditioned by morphosyntactic features and by root identity (see e.g.,
Additionally, the same exact pattern of disjunctive conditioning is attested in other languages: there are other instances of a single plural suffix being used in the context of
(52)
a.
gir
chalk.
‘chalk’
b.
gir-im
chalk-
‘chalks’ (
(53)
a.
leven-a
brick-
‘brick’
b.
leven-im
brick-
‘bricks’ (
Under the approach here,
(54)
All of the previous research on Hebrew plural marking has treated the plural suffix
Overall, then, all that needs to be done to capture
In this section, we explore what follows from the two-gender-feature inventory in M22, (55).
(55)
a.
Feminine:
b.
Masculine:
c.
Ambigeneric:
(55) is essential for M22 to capture the feminine/ambigeneric syncretism in the plural, but we suggest in this section that adopting (55) has several non-ideal consequences: arguably more complexity, overgeneration of types of
Assuming that M22 and our analysis have the same empirical coverage with respect to adjectival agreement, it seems to us that M22 is
Moreover, the larger number of gender features causes the Impoverishment operations in M22 to be more complex along several dimensions. Compare the operations from Section 2 in (56) with their equivalents in M22 in (57). We have reformatted our Impoverishment operations to be similar to those in M22 for ease of comparison.
(56)
a.
[+
b.
[–
(57)
a.
[γ] → Ø/ __ [–
b.
[γ] → Ø/ __ [–
[#]
The structural descriptions of the Impoverishment operations in (57) are arguably more complex than those in (56) in three ways: (i) in (57)a, number features must be included, unlike in (56)a (see Section 4.2.1), (ii) in (57)a, the contextual restriction includes one more feature than (56)a,
Setting aside complexity now, another consequence of the gender inventory in (55) is that it overgenerates a specific combination of gender features. Because there are two gender features (
(58)
a.
Feminine:
b.
Masculine:
c.
Ambigeneric:
d.
What rules out (58)d, a
This leads us to the final consequence of (55): a lack of clarity on the connection between the gender features on
(59)
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
Roughly speaking, (59)a is used to form nominals interpreted as having social female gender identity or (if denoting an animal) female biological sex, and (59)b the same for male. (59)de are used to form nouns that do not convey any information about social gender identity (for humans) or biological sex (for animals); (59)d is used for masculine nouns like
For current purposes, though, it suffices to observe that the analysis of Romanian in Section 2 is fully compatible with (59). The Impoverishment rules in Section 2 work given the inventory of
Returning now to M22, if it is assumed that [
Overall, then, we have shown that M22 and our analysis fare equally well with respect to Romanian adjectival agreement. However, we have suggested here that M22 is more complex and it predicts the existence of an unattested kind of
So far, we have focused on Romanian data to compare our analysis to M22. However, in this section, we return to Guébie and explore the consequences of M22 when it is extended to ambigeneric nouns in this language.
Recall that M22 proposes that the Romanian gender feature inventory includes two features: [+/–
(60)
a.
b.
c.
Human nouns
Non-human nouns
Ambigeneric nouns
Impoverishment operations would eliminate the [
Even though the analysis works mechanically, it is difficult to justify. In order to have the ambigeneric nouns specified negatively for two features, there must be a semantically-unmotivated second gender feature [
(61)
a.
b.
c.
Human nouns
Non-human noun
Ambigeneric nouns
However, if ambigeneric nouns were specified as [–
Overall, the Guébie gender system can be successfully analyzed using a single semantically-motivated gender feature (Section 3), so (60) requires an additional, semantically-problematic gender feature without empirical motivation.
The present analysis and the analysis in M22 cover the same empirical ground and are constructed from the same raw materials: Impoverishment, Vocabulary Items, and an inventory of gender features on
This paper has developed a unified analysis of ambigeneric nouns in Romanian and Guébie. In both languages, ambigeneric nouns lack gender features, and Impoverishment operations lead to the ambigeneric agreement pattern. We have argued that this approach is more successful than some alternative approaches including a syntactic analysis with gender features on Num (
Outside of its implications for the analysis of ambigeneric nouns, the conclusions of this paper lend support to the approach to the morphosyntax of gender developed in
We close with some brief discussion of two additional implications. First, the parallel between Guébie and Romanian gender shows that gender systems can be configured very similarly across languages even when the identity of the gender feature is different. The Guébie gender system assigns gender semantically based on human-ness, whereas the Romanian gender system assigns it semantically based on social gender identity for humans or biological sex for animals (masculine/feminine). However, because Guébie and Romanian are so similar, it seems that a different interpretation of the gender feature does not lead to a different morphosyntax, thus supporting treatments of grammatical gender as a uniform morphosyntactic phenomenon (as in e.g.,
Future work will also hopefully explore the implications of the Guébie/Romanian parallel for the diachrony of gender. Both Romanian (
Gloss abbreviations follow the Leipzig Glossing Conventions with the addition of
Most neuter nouns are inanimate, but inanimate nouns are also found in the other genders (see (1), (2)).
See also
DM approaches to Romanian ambigeneric nouns descend directly from earlier underspecificational approaches like
We have made two minor modifications to the Vocabulary Items in (5). First, we removed an unspecified categorial feature because it is not relevant here. Second, we fixed a typo in associating one of the plural exponents with features.
The Impoverishment approach is close in spirit to Jakobson’s (
There are a few attested instances of speakers using [
Sande (
The definite marker is an enclitic (not a suffix) because it does not undergo ATR harmony with the stem (
This analysis differs from Corbett’s (
(18)b also has tone for the sake of completeness, but it is likely that the tone actually indicates nominative case (compare
Determining this for certain would require a more fine-grained analysis of Guébie (see
There is also some evidence that, in Guébie, singular linguistic objects which lack gender features trigger non-human agreement. For example, when referring to a clause or situation, such as “Do you play soccer with the children?” “Yes, I do
The plural agreement markers cannot be straightforwardly analyzed as derived from an underspecified vowel whose features are determined phonologically. This is because singular non-human nouns ending in a high front vowel trigger a central-front agreement vowel (
A potential alternative analysis (suggested by an anonymous reviewer) would posit a single Impoverishment operation that deletes [–
We focus on addressing formal and synchronic approaches to Romanian ambigeneric nouns for purposes of space and ease of comparison. We hope that future work will integrate the analysis here with other approaches (e.g.,
See also
There are at least two additional semantic rules: abstract nouns are assigned to Class B and nouns denoting trees are assigned to Class A. We omit these for the sake of simplicity.
It is straightforward for the Distributed Morphology analysis argued for in this paper to capture plural marking in Guébie; see (41).
We focus here on adjectival inflection, setting aside inflection on nouns, demonstratives, definite articles, etc. We restrict our attention to adjectives because they are the main kind of evidence against
Modified slightly to be consistent with the number features used here.
It is likely that these symbols represent nodes in a feature hierarchy, but M22 does not claim this explicitly.
This approach also explains the coordination facts from Section 4.1. A predicate adjective that agrees with coordinated ambigeneric nouns will have a plural feature and a [–
We also added [–
Many thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion and a second anonymous reviewer for relevant discussion. An alternative would be to posit two Vocabulary Items: one plural
An alternative approach could posit a diacritic [
Another Hebrew plural suffix
Nouns that take exceptional plural markers in Hebrew still trigger agreement in the gender they have in the singular. In other words, ‘brick’ in (53) is still a feminine noun despite having a ‘masculine’ plural marker; these nouns are not ambigeneric (see
M22 discusses the syncretic paradigms of two additional adjectives:
We do not explore the predictions of our analysis and M22 for default gender agreement because both face similar problems (
One could argue that the single-gender feature analysis that we adopt is more complex because it makes use of three values for the gender feature: +/–/Ø. However, to be clear, we assume that some
In an attempt at simplification, the Impoverishment rules in M22 could be recast as (i):
(i) a. [+ [– → Ø b. [– [– → [–
This would effectively generate the metasyncretism, but it is not sufficiently constrained. For example, after (i)a deletes [–
Our analysis and M22 also have the same number of Vocabulary Items (four).
It may seem like grammatical gender is at best loosely connected to semantics, in part because many well-studied languages contain large numbers of nouns where gender is not assigned semantically. However, a major discovery of the typological literature on grammatical gender is that, in every grammatical gender system, at least some of the nouns are assigned gender based on their semantic interpretation (sometimes called the “Semantic Core” generalization; see
If it is possible for
Positing an unmotivated feature like [
An anonymous reviewer points out that there is no semantic conflict if we adopt a Jakobsonian (
To be clear, we are arguing against using two
M22 also notes that the Impoverishment rules in
Hannah Sande’s research was supported by NSF-DEL grant #1760302.
Many, many thanks to the Guébie community. Thanks also to Maya Barzilai, Alison Biggs, Bryce Huebner, Nubantood Khalil, Maddie Oakley, and Lydia Felice for valuable feedback, to Naomi Lee for commenting on the whole paper, and to the audience at the 50th Annual Conference on African Linguistics. We thank the editor and the three anonymous reviewers whose generous and thorough comments greatly improved the paper. Finally, we thank Jack Pruett, Luopeng Zheng, and Erin Tirpak for assistance in the preparation of this manuscript.
The authors have no competing interests to declare.