School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications

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Women, houses, and plural objects?: homophony in the Mian Gender System

Fedden, Sebastian (School of Languages and Linguistics, The University of Melbourne, 2007)

This paper discusses two alternative analyses of the Mian gender system, which shows pervasive homophony in its gender/number markers, for instance the agreement forms for singular females and plural inanimates are identical. This form of syncretism across features is called polarity. The first analysis establishes four genders as agreement classes defined by sets of agreement markers: masculine, feminine, and two neuter genders. Second, a two-class system consisting of only a masculine and a feminine gender plus a distinction between animate and inanimate referents will be proposed. Such a two-gender system has to assume that for inanimates a switch in number can result in a switch in gender and vice versa. Because of this conflation of gender and number the two-gender analysis will be rejected for Mian in favour of the first.