Gender Features and Coordination Resolution in Greek and Other Three-Gendered Languages: Implications for the Cross-Linguistic Representation of Gender

Abstract

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.