Coordinating Gender: What Can Coordinate Structure Agreement Tell Us about Gender?
Coordinating Gender: What Can Coordinate Structure Agreement Tell Us about Gender?

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines gender agreement with coordinate structures in Serbian, focusing exclusively on coordinate phrases with singular conjuncts. I discuss in detail four unexpected and challenging facts about coordinate structure gender agreement and provide a unified account of them. I argue that a participle or predicative adjective agreeing with a coordinate phrase takes the default masculine form either when the coordinate phrase contains conflicting gender information, which can sometimes surprisingly happen even when all conjuncts have identical gender specifications, or when at least one of the conjuncts is not marked for a gender value. On the bases of behavior of neuter, I also propose that gender in Serbian (and possibly other Slavic languages) should be represented in terms of binary features [±masculine] and [±feminine].

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