Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

According to classic typological research, grammatical gender can be assigned to nouns in several different ways. Gender can be assigned semantically (depending on social gender identity, animacy, etc.), morphologically (depending on the presence of a specific affix), or phonologically (e.g., depending on the final segment of the noun).  In this talk, I take a critical look at the last member of this list: phonological gender assignment. I present three case studies of languages that have been canonically claimed to have phonological gender assignment: Hausa (Chadic), Guébie (Kru) and Afar (Cushitic).  For all of these languages, I argue that phonological gender assignment is not necessary to describe the gender system and, more importantly, a phonological gender assignment analysis is less explanatory than alternative approaches (it misses generalizations, makes typologically-unexpected predictions, and/or cannot extend to related phenomena). In Distributed Morphology, phonological gender assignment is predicted to be impossible because gender is assigned during the syntactic derivation and the syntax lacks phonological information.  The results from Hausa, Afar and Guébie therefore provide support for Distributed Morphology, and against theories where gender is assigned in the lexicon with access to phonological information. I close the talk with plans for future work to investigate additional languages with (alleged) phonological gender assignment.