Gender Features and Coordination Resolution in Greek and Other Three-Gendered Languages
Implications for the Cross-Linguistic Representation of Gender
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10719310 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Luke James Adamson (0000-0003-0952-6001, Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, [email protected]), Elena Anagnostopoulou (0000-0001-7782-0072, University of Crete and IMS-FORTH, [email protected]) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Pages | 1-76 |
| Publication date | 2024-09-06 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Linguistic Inquiry (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0024-3892 • E-ISSN: 1530-9150 |
| Publisher | MIT Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1162/ling_a_00543 |
| OpenAlex | W4402299035 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
Many three-gendered languages have in common that some nouns are assigned conceptual gender – where the value of gender correlates with the interpretation of the noun – while other nouns are assigned arbitrary gender – where there is no such correlation. Strikingly, however, such languages do not always pattern together in how they resolve agreement with gender-mismatched coordinated nominals. If coordination resolution reflects feature representation, variation across languages with similar gender categories presents a puzzle. We hypothesize that resolution with gender-mismatched human and inanimate coordinated nominals is predictable from how properties like animacy and individuation are encoded within a language’s gender system. Focusing on Greek and contrasting patterns in Icelandic and Bosnian/Coratian/Serbian (BCS), we capture resolved agreement patterns through i) an interpretable vs. uninterpretable feature distinction, ii) a feature-geometric account à la Harley and Ritter 2002; and iii) universal coordination resolution mechanisms we refer to as percolation and conversion. Our system correlates resolution with other language-internal properties for gender agreement across the languages we investigate and captures complex patterns of resolution that have not been fully appreciated
Grammatical Gender · Linguistics · Political science · Representation (politics) · Resolution (logic) · Sociology · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Gender Studies in Language · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Philosophy
| Citations per year | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Highly cited | No |