Morphosyntax of Gender in Russian Sex-Differentiable Nouns

Abstract

This paper investigates the morphosyntax of gender in Russian sex-differentiable nouns within the framework of Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993; Halle 1997; Marantz 1997), which, to the best of my knowledge, has not been studied before. Distributed Morphology differentiates between word formation from √ roots and from syntactic categories; this distinction enables us to analyze syntactic processes that happen within words. The paper argues that grammatical gender in sex-differentiable nouns can be determined from a combination of the declension class and the natural gender of the referent. Thus there is no need to posit grammatical gender features in the syntax of such nouns. This work is a revision and development of the earlier Distributed Gender Hypothesis (Steriopolo and Wiltschko 2010). This research will be of interest to Russian specialists, language typologists, and theoretical linguists, as well as to anyone interested in the Russian language and gender.