Dr. Ivona Kucerová

The syntax of gender features

Current theories of syntax tend to treat φ-features fundamentally differently than other syntactic features, both in terms of their geometry and the types of syntactic relations they enter. This talk proposes a syntax-centered theory of gender. The guiding idea is that if gender is a syntactic feature, then it should display properties of a syntactic feature, separable from its post-syntactic realizations (morphological realizations and semantic interpretations). In particular, I will argue that φ -features are not syntactically special but their bundling configurations may yield opaque morphological realizations. The case study will be the gender system of Czech. I will argue that the gender feature can – and does – undergo feature movement that results in feature bundling with features of higher functional projections. The empirical profile of these bundling configurations presents a methodological conundrum: I demonstrate that some of the diagnostics used in the literature to probe the gender feature in fact target other features the gender feature bundles with. To uncover the underlying narrow syntax feature structures our diagnostics must carefully separate post-syntactic reflexes from their syntactic underpinning.