Morphology & Syntax workshop

We are excited to welcome Sid Bhushan (Michigan), a student visiting from Ann Arbor as a part of our MWSSE exchange! Title and abstract follow: 

Number-driven gender syncretism and Impoverishment: some insights from Kannada

Grammatical gender is the system of sorting nouns into multiple classes based on some property of the noun and is reflected by agreement patterns within a language. These agreement patterns are often subject to syncretism—when the same morphological marker is used for multiple genders. Such syncretisms are also often related to other features such as number: many languages lack gender distinction in non-singular numbers. In this talk, I will discuss the gender system of Kannada and its interactions with number. In particular, I'll focus on a type of number-driven gender syncretism that has not been extensively studied cross-linguistically: partial convergence. This occurs when some, but not all, gender distinctions are not expressed in non-singular numbers. Kannada exhibits three grammatical gender distinctions (masculine, feminine, neuter) in the singular, but only two in the plural (there is no distinction between masculine and feminine). Working within the framework of Distributed Morphology, I adopt an analysis based on Kramer's (2015) analysis of gender, placing it as a feature on the nominalizing n head. Under this framework, forced underspecification of gender features in plural contexts, via a post-syntactic Impoverishment operation that erases certain feature combinations, is responsible for the resulting syncretism. However, previous approaches to number-driven gender syncretism (Bobaljik 2002; Harley 2008; Kramer 2019) are able to mostly capture the phenomena seen in Kannada, but fail to explain partial convergence (as opposed to full convergence) without further refinement of the featural representation of grammatical gender. I argue for a more complex featural structure, wherein grammatical gender in Kannada (and other languages with similar gender systems) includes separate representations of animacy and traditional gender.