Semantic agreement in Russian

Gender, declension, and morphological ineffability

Bibliographic Data

ID11292005
AuthorsMariia Privizentseva (0000-0002-2660-9944, Leipzig University, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume42
Issue2
Pages767-814
Publication date2024-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueNatural Language and Linguistic Theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0167-806X • E-ISSN: 1573-0859
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1007/s11049-023-09587-0
OpenAlexW4388523995
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited70

In this paper, I argue that declension classes are not primitives (see Aronoff 1994; Alexiadou 2004; Kramer 2015; i.a.), but are decomposed into simpler features, one of which is gender (Harris 1991; Wiese 2004; Caha 2019). The argument is based on semantic gender agreement in Russian, where a grammatically masculine noun can trigger feminine agreement if its referent is female (Mučnik 1971; Pesetsky 2013). Semantic agreement is grammatical only in those forms where a regular nominal exponent is syncretic with an exponent of a declension class that includes feminine nouns. In other forms, conflicting masculine and feminine gender features lead to ineffability in morphology (cf. Schütze 2003; Asarina 2011; Coon and Keine 2020). Ineffability arises because the Subset Principle (Halle 1997) that holds between features of a vocabulary item and a terminal at the point of Vocabulary Insertion is violated later in the derivation. This is in turn possible if Vocabulary Insertion applying cyclically bottom-up (Bobaljik 2000) is interleaved with Lowering that alters structure below a triggering node (Embick and Noyer 2001). Finally, I show that Russian also has a number of cases where conflicting gender features in a noun phrase do not result in a realization failure (Iomdin 1980). The difference between these patterns is derived in a principled way and follows from the positions where conflicting features are introduced

Agreement · Linguistics · Noun · Noun phrase · Referent · Syntax · Vocabulary · Computer Science · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · Medicine · Natural Language Processing Techniques · Philosophy · Psychology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

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