Grammatical gender in nominal syntax

• Applicant: Dr. Luke Adamson, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 568417148

Grammatical gender is characterized by the sorting of nouns into classes, which reflects an interpretable property for at least some of the classes’ members, and by marking on other elements that agree with these nouns or with their corresponding nominal phrases. In many languages, it is possible for a noun’s formal gender value to diverge from the interpretable value the noun would have otherwise; for example, in Italian, guardia 'guard' is feminine but can refer to a man, and nouns referring to men in Italian typically take masculine gender. This type of gender ‘mismatch’ is also known to give rise to situations in which elements that agree with the same noun differ in the gender value they express (in so-called 'hybrid agreement'). Some previous work has suggested that the formal vs. interpretable gender dichotomy is in fact syntactic in nature, with interpretable gender features associated with larger nominal structures than formal gender features, though this hypothesis remains underexplored. The resolution of this issue has important implications for how formal and interpretable components of linguistic expressions are encoded by the grammar more generally, and how these values are represented in the morphosyntax of agreement. The objective of the current project is to assess the connection between nominal structure and grammatical gender through the lens of agreement mismatches. While the utility of fixed-gender nominals like guardia has been acknowledged in previous research on gender agreement, this project employs such nominals in a more comprehensive investigation in which the amount of nominal structure is modulated, to observe the effects of nominal structure on formal vs. interpretable gender agreement. Two broad categories considered as part of the project involve agreement with a nominal consisting of two parts in apposition, whose two parts differ in their gender value; and ii) agreement with a single nominal whose amount of structure can be varied (e.g. bare vs. marked nominal predication). The core phenomena investigated as part of this project include: different types of apposition, 'polite' pronouns, imposters, and nominal predicates, with cross-linguistic data coming from native speaker judgments in various languages, including Italian, Greek, and German.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Greece
• Co-Investigators: Professorin Dr. Artemis Alexiadou; Dr. Stanislao Zompì
• Cooperation Partner: Professorin Dr. Elena Anagnostopoulou