Gender and interpretation in Greek: Comments on Merchant (2014)

Abstract

Merchant (2014, “Gender mismatches under nominal ellipsis”, Lingua, 151: 9–32) makes the following two claims about nominal ellipsis in (Modern) Greek. (i) There are three classes of MASCULINE-FEMININE noun pairs that differ in whether nominal ellipsis with gender mismatch is possible. (ii) Nominal ellipsis with gender mismatch is possible in predicative positions but not in argument positions. We take issue with both of these claims. Our qualms about (i) are relatively minor. It appears that his primary data are hard to replicate, but we present novel sets of data involving focus constructions that also demonstrate that Greek has three classes of MASCULINE-FEMININE noun pairs. As for (ii), we argue that it is empirically inaccurate and nominal ellipsis with gender mismatch is in fact possible in argument positions as well. This is problematic for the analysis Merchant develops, as it is tailored to derive (ii). Furthermore, we argue that his analysis does not give a straightforward account of our observations about focus constructions. We put forward an alternative account of the interpretation of gendered nouns according to which there are three types of nouns with gender inferences: (a) those that have gender inferences in both assertive and presuppositional dimensions of meaning, (b) those that only have gender inferences in the presuppositional dimension of meaning, and (c) those that do not have gender inferences in their semantics but through competition with the opposite gender (gender competition).

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“…the declension class on the agreeing item, from that on the controller of agreement rather than the other way around and does not face the problem of ambiguity of feminine agreement between class III and IV realisation. It is compatible with the findings regarding the pragmatic competition between minimal pairs (Merchant 2014;Sudo, Spathas 2019). Finally, it does not have to store a significant amount of lexical material or forms as idioms interpreted contrary to their feature specification or otherwise face a large number of exceptions.…”

“…There are two more reasons why natural gender is unlikely to be a feature. One is that it often emerges as a consequence of the existence of a minimal pair of lexical items specialised for the opposite genders (see also Merchant 2014;Sudo, Spathas 2019). This indicates that lexical competition in pragmatics is a possible source of natural gender, even if the lexical semantics does not necessarily include it (this is supported by the effect of number, as in plural, gender-general interpretation figures more prominently in the pragmatic competition, see also Puškar 2018;Mitić, Arsenijević 2019).…”

Zero-Derived Nouns in Greek

“…This is in sharp contrast to feminine on human nouns, which is semantically and morphologically more marked than masculine in Greek, as in several Indo-European languages, as evidenced by a variety of diagnostics (Merchant 2014;Alexiadou 2017;Sudo and Spathas 2020;Adamson and Anagnostopoulou 2021). By contrast, the default nature of feminine with abstract nouns seems to be related to the original function of the feminine affix in Indo-European.…”

“…The final assumption we will adopt is the view that gender is on n, see Kramer (2015) for a general such claim and Merchant (2014), Alexiadou (2017), Anagnostopoulou (2017), Markopoulos (2017Markopoulos ( , 2018, Sudo and Spathas (2020), and Adamson and Anagnostopoulou (2021) for Greek. As already mentioned, the fact that affixed nominalizations are gendered in Greek provides further support for this view.…”