Speaker: Jenneke van der Wal (Leiden university)
Title: Gender on n in Bantu DP structure: from root-derived nominals to locatives (a joint work with Zuzanna Fuchs)
Date: Thursday 04 April
Venue: Van Eyckhof 2/006
Time: 15.15-16.30 hrs (drinks follow at Cafe de Keyzer)
Abstract:
Grammatical gender is a noun-categorizing feature that is not interpretable and largely arbitrary. Big questions are where this gender information is stored (in the lexicon, Num, Gen, or n) and whether this varies crosslinguistically. In this talk we test the proposal that gender is universally on n (Kramer 2015, following Kihm 2005 and Ferrari 2005, among others) by establishing the parameters of variation across a range of Bantu languages. We show in a DM account how gender on n can account for the morphosyntactic properties of noun classes, also in derived nominals (deverbal, diminutive, and locative), and how a structural difference between diminutives and locatives has potential consequences for our thinking about the reference.