Gender features as formal features: some remarks
Phoevos Panagiotidis
February 2021
 

This squib raises three matters: first, it discusses the conditions under which it is necessary to posit gender features, as opposed to gender being a facet of ‘lexical’ / encyclopaedic content. Second, it looks into how we can use gender features to describe the cross-linguistic generalisation that there exist no completely arbitrary gender systems, by appealing to their structural positions and their interpretability. Finally, it brings to focus evidence from Modern Greek suggesting that exponent insertion of nouns factors in semantic gender, albeit not in an always successful way.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/005766
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: Unpublished ms., Athens, Greece
keywords: gender, formal feature, animacy, turkish, greek, interpretability, morphology, syntax
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