Arabic Profession-Denoting Nouns and Gender: A Morphosyntactic Analysis of Agreement

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to present a minimalist feature-based analysis that captures the verbal agreement triggered by female referent profession-denoting nouns in Modern Standard Arabic. In this language, nouns are classified as masculine or feminine based on the natural gender of their referents. Masculine nouns trigger masculine agreement on verbs, whereas feminine nouns trigger feminine agreement. However, some profession-denoting nouns are sometimes gender-neutralized; a masculine noun could be used when the natural gender of its referent is female. In this case, the masculine noun triggers feminine agreement on the verb. This unexpected type of agreement requires analysis under the latest assumptions of the Minimalist Program. The paper shows that the gender-neutralized nouns are initially selected from the numeration and introduced into the derivation with their gender feature specified as feminine. After their features are valued in narrow syntax, these nouns undergo a post-syntactic morphological operation that targets and deletes the feminine morphemes, leaving behind the masculine roots.