Getting Rid of MASC - The Encoding of Gender in Italian
Pietro Baggio
August 2022
 

Nouns and noun phrases in Italian are typically described as coming in one of two genders: masculine or feminine. Accordingly, many analyses in the generative tradition take the Italian gender system to be binary, both in the morphology and in the syntax. The purpose of this paper is to argue that this view is fundamentally misguided, and leaves unexplained a large set of morphosyntactic asymmetries between so-called “masculine” and “feminine” nouns. I will contend that the Italian gender system is privative: feminine nouns contain a projection hosting a [fem] feature in the syntax, while masculine nouns simply lack such a projection altogether
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/006753
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: submitted
keywords: gender, feminine, privative features, nominal morphology, contextual categorization, roots, noncompositional content, semantics, morphology, syntax
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