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In:Romance Linguistics 2012: Selected papers from the 42nd Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), Cedar City, Utah, 20-22 April 2012
Edited by Jason Smith and Tabea Ihsane
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 7] 2015
► pp. 229–244

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Gender features on n & the root

An account of gender in French

Published online: 28 August 2015
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.7.15atk
French presents a challenge to single feature gender analyses. For animate nouns natural sex is often realized instead of grammatical gender. Also, the sex and gender of epicene nouns – animates with fixed gender that allow no morphological representation of sex – can conflict. I argue for a two feature analysis, following Kramer’s (2009) proposal for Amharic: one feature on n that represents natural sex and another on the root that represents grammatical gender. Utilizing elements from Distributed Morphology (DM) including licensing conditions and a version of agree (Pesetsky & Torrego 2007), this analysis is shown to account for all of the problematic French data.
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Cited by four other publications

Hvidsten, Eirik
2023. A HYBRID ANALYSIS OF THE FRENCH PRONOUN EN*. Studia Linguistica 77:3 ► pp. 561 ff. DOI logo
Steriopolo, Olga, Giorgos Markopoulos & Vassilios Spyropoulos
2021. A morphosyntactic analysis of nominal expressive suffixes in Russian and Greek. The Linguistic Review 38:4 ► pp. 645 ff. DOI logo
Ihsane, Tabea & Petra Sleeman
2016. Gender agreement with animate nouns in French. In Romance Linguistics 2013 [Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory, 9], ► pp. 159 ff. DOI logo
Kramer, Ruth
2016. The location of gender features in the syntax. Language and Linguistics Compass 10:11 ► pp. 661 ff. DOI logo

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