Representing gender and defaults: Evidence from Lithuanian

Abstract

This study examines gender representation and defaults in Lithuanian by investigating the inflection on predicative adjectives (PAs). We provide novel evidence for two types of defaults in the representation of gender, masculine being the unmarked gender, and neuter being the absence of gender. It is demonstrated that neuter PAs appear when the subject lacks gender features accessible for agreement with the PA, which we refer to as non-agreement. In contrast, masculine PAs appear when the PA agrees with a subject bearing an unmarked gender feature. We analyze masculine and feminine as sharing a feature [GEND] that originates on n, the locus of gender features (following Lecarme 2002; Lowenstamm 2008; Kramer 2015; 2016), with the default gender – the masculine – bearing only this feature, and the more marked gender – the feminine – having an additional feature [FEM]. Neuter corresponds to the absence of these features. By placing gender features on the nominalizing head n, our account explicitly relates the distribution of gender inflection to nominal syntax and agreement.

Gender Agreement Mismatches in Heritage Greek

“…Specifically, there is a second type of default, which is actually the unmarked gender that emerges in, e.g., coordinated noun phrases containing both animates and inanimates. Coordinated noun phrases show a resolving form of gender agreement: in Greek, the target surfaces with masculine morphology, when the controller is human, (13), and with neuter morphology when the controller is inanimate, 14, and see Kramer (2015) The refined and revised picture on gender values in SMG suggests that the language has two types of defaults, as Adamson and Šereikaitė (2019) propose for Lithuanian: (a) genderdefault forms which are the unmarked gender forms. As Anagnostopoulou (2017) and Markopoulos (2018) argue, these forms are relativized to human-ness in Greek.…”

The dual face of structural object case: on Lithuanian genitive of negation

“…In the DP object graži-os knyg-os ‘beautiful book’ in (72b), the feature values of n Infl (i.e. genitive and singular) are realized with the exponent -os in (75), and the same applies to a Infl, which is an adjectival node (Adamson & Šereikaitė 2019). …”

Impersonals, passives, and impersonal pronouns: Lessons from Lithuanian

“…Masculine is the default gender in the language (Holvoet & Semėnienė 2006, Bruno 2012, Adamson & Šereikaitė 2019. The impersonal pronoun is assigned default gender in cases like (106): it refers to a mixedgender group, which is one of the environments where the unmarked gender form occurs (see Adamson & Šereikaitė 2019 for discussion). In a suitable context, the impersonal pronoun can be either masculine or feminine depending on the referential gender of a subject.…”