Speaker: Luke Adamson (Harvard University)
Title: Gender and Inalienable Possession
Time: Wednesday, March 17th, 5pm – 6:30pm
Abstract: The present work investigates whether a noun’s gender can be determined (or ‘assigned’) by its possessor, in a way that is expected (in principle) from independent lines of research on gender and possession, each which attribute importance to projections low within the nominal domain (e.g. Kramer 2015 and Myler 2016, respectively). I provide evidence indicating that the gender of a possessee noun can be determined by properties of an inalienable possessor in five unrelated languages: Teop (Austronesian, Oceanic), Jarawara (Arawan), Yanyuwa (Pama-Nyungan), Coastal Marind (Trans-New Guinea, Anim), and Ripano (Romance). I propose that gender features on the nominalizing head n can be conditioned locally, specifically by elements within nP, and not by elements higher in the nominal domain. This proposal predicts an asymmetry between inalienable possessors, which have been argued to have a tight structural relationship with their possessee, and alienable possessors, which have been argued to be introduced by a higher Poss head (Alexiadou 2003, Myler 2016; among others). This prediction is borne out in the five languages examined here, for which only inalienable possessors appear to show influence on the possessee’s gender. If on the right track, this proposal calls into question the viability of analyses that allow gender on n to be valued at a distance via Agree, suggesting the existence of a substantive universal, which restricts gender features on n to entering syntactic derivations valued. The present work thus expands our understanding of what types of elements can be relevant to gender assignment.