Semantic Gender Diversity and Its Architecture in the Grammar of Arabic

Abstract

The article argues that Gender expresses a multitude of meanings including individuation, collectivity, abstractness, quantity, size, evaluation, perspectivization, in addition to the most known sex-animacy. In contrast to the dominant view in the literature, which sees Gender as essentially (a) a nominal class marking device, (b) semantically sex-based, and (c) syntactically reflected in gender agreement through sexed-animate controllers, we propose a constructional multi-layered architecture that takes into account its polysemous nature, and provides room for more ‘unorthodox’ syntactic distributions. The analysis is implemented in a Minimalist Distributed Morphology model of Grammar.