The grammar of gender - Detailseite

When hearing a sentence like (1) The student went back to her room competent speakers of English infer that the student talked about is a woman. A reasonable assumption when thinking about how this comes about is that in this case gender information is conveyed by use of a specific form of the possessive pronoun, the feminine form her. In examples like (2) The actress went back to her room, on the other hand, there are two morphologically overt sources of gender inferences, the pronoun her and the suffix -ess on the nominal. But if so, could we perhaps assume that the same is true in (1); i.e. that the noun student is like actress and similarly carries a suffix like -ess, which just happens to be unpronounced? And if this is the case, could it perhaps be that all gender information always and only comes from the noun itself and that gender on the pronoun is just a meaningless grammatical reflex of agreeing with nouns carrying such suffixes? What arguments can we use to decide between these different analytical options? And what is the importance of our answers to a theory of the lexicon, syntactic agreement, and the syntax-semantics interface? In this course we will answer some of these questions by exploring the morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics of the grammatical category of gender. We will start with a comprehensive look at English, a language with a more limited gender system, and then make comparisons with languages with more elaborate gender systems, like German and Greek.