Abstract
The present paper argues for a view of gender agreement without either grammatical or natural gender being represented as syntactic features. Rather than deriving declension classes in terms of realisation, I postulate them as the only relevant feature that is lexically specified on the noun. Agreement copies the declension class and triggers presuppositions. When these presuppositions clash with those already active in the discourse, default agreement is realised. The paper moreover provides a quantitative analysis of semantic correlates of declension classes and a novel analysis of SC declension classes.
Highlights
Serbo-Croatian (SC) nouns are traditionally divided in four declension classes and three genders (e.g. Stevanović 1989)
The difference between the nominative and the accusative would be an argument in favour of a realisational nature of declension classes. This would not be in clash with the main thesis of this article: that grammatical gender is a derivative of declension classes and not vice versa
The central goal of this paper is to develop an explicit reductionist analysis of the relation between gender and properties of quantity on the one hand, and declension classes on the other, where it is the declension class that is represented by a feature, with gender effects deriving from it, rather than the other way around as previously argued
Summary
Serbo-Croatian (SC) nouns are traditionally divided in four declension classes and three genders (e.g. Stevanović 1989). The difference between the nominative and the accusative (not attested in uncontroversial class II animates) would be an argument in favour of a realisational nature of declension classes Still, this would not be in clash with the main thesis of this article: that grammatical gender is a derivative of declension classes and not vice versa. A significant advantage of the latter type of accounts is that they can explain regularities about intra- and interdeclension syncretism Alternative approaches, such as Hachem (2015), Fassi Fehri (2018), Arsenijević (2017), argue that declension classes as well as agreement reflect properties of quantity The other three classes are ordered according to the balance between the role played by the theme vowel and case endings, and their tendency to be realised overtly
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