Journal | Balcania et Slavia
Journal issue | 1 | 1 | 2021
Research Article | No Gender in ‘Gender Agreement’: On Declension Classes and Gender in Serbo-Croatian
No Gender in ‘Gender Agreement’: On Declension Classes and Gender in Serbo-Croatian
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.
Submitted: July 20, 2021 | Accepted: Oct. 15, 2021 | Published Dec. 20, 2021 | Language: en
Keywords Gender • Agreement • Properties of quantity • Serbo-Croatian • Declension class
Copyright © 2021 Boban Arsenijević. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
