Terje Lohndal – talk at the Morpho-Syn Syndicate

On April 11, Terje Lohndal (NTNU – Norwegian University of Science and Technology & UiT The Arctic University of Norway) will give an online talk with the title The many features of grammatical gender: A case study of Norwegian

If interested, please contact Mike Putnam for the zoom link.

Abstract

Grammatical gender is a formal property of nouns which influences other grammatical properties such as agreement inside a nominal phrase and at the clausal level. Given that agreement is typically modelled by way of formal features, this this strongly suggests that grammatical gender should be modelled by similar features. This raises questions regarding what these features are and how they are structured. Despite the prevalence of grammatical gender/noun classes in the world’s languages, the nature of gender features as such has not received much careful discussion in the literature. The goal of the present presentation is to explore the nature of grammatical gender features from a formal perspective. The empirical evidence will mainly be based on Norwegian.