Gender as a property of words and as a property of structures

Abstract

A reflection on the essence of gender as a grammatical concept leads to examining some phenomena which suggest that gender is fundamentally a property of nominal syntactic structures, rather than a word-property shared between morphemes in a structure. It is true that what drives the choice of gender value are mainly ‘controller’ lexical items; but the facts discussed suggest that this should not justify a theoretical understanding of gender as primarily a property of nouns, which happens to be shared in syntactic agreement. There are empirical grounds, it is claimed, for interpreting gender as a morphological expression of agreement relations. The crucial assumption that lexical items are also grammatically represented as formal structures makes it possible to encompass under this analysis cases where gender is and is not associated to the mental representation of a lexical word.

Keywords

• gender
• interpretable features
• nouns
• nominality