The grammar of gender: Insights from Bantu asymmetries of AGR with conjoined subjects
摘要
This paper provides a novel analysis of asymmetries in gender agreement with conjoined subjects, accounting for a range phenomena in the Xhosa and Shona languages. For all Xhosa conjoined gender-mismatched singular DPs, the gender of plural agreement with &P depends on whether the conjuncts share the feature [human], [inanimate], or [animal]. I argue that this reflects a stacked nP structure within Bantu nominals: whatever a DP’s visible gender, it includes an nP core with one of these three semantic genders. Thus the internal structure is [nP1 n1 [nP2 n2+root]]; n2 is always the bearer of a semantic gender. n2 values agreement if: (i) the conjoined DPs have mismatching visible n1 gender features but the same n2 cores, or (ii) the visible gender of the two conjuncts matches but is formally uninterpretable, assuming with Adamson and Anagnostopoulou (