Gender and interpretation in Greek: Comments on Merchant (2014)

Abstract

Merchant (2014, “Gender mismatches under nominal ellipsis”, Lingua, 151: 9–32) makes the following two claims about nominal ellipsis in (Modern) Greek. (i) There are three classes of MASCULINE-FEMININE noun pairs that differ in whether nominal ellipsis with gender mismatch is possible. (ii) Nominal ellipsis with gender mismatch is possible in predicative positions but not in argument positions. We take issue with both of these claims. Our qualms about (i) are relatively minor. It appears that his primary data are hard to replicate, but we present novel sets of data involving focus constructions that also demonstrate that Greek has three classes of MASCULINE-FEMININE noun pairs. As for (ii), we argue that it is empirically inaccurate and nominal ellipsis with gender mismatch is in fact possible in argument positions as well. This is problematic for the analysis Merchant develops, as it is tailored to derive (ii). Furthermore, we argue that his analysis does not give a straightforward account of our observations about focus constructions. We put forward an alternative account of the interpretation of gendered nouns according to which there are three types of nouns with gender inferences: (a) those that have gender inferences in both assertive and presuppositional dimensions of meaning, (b) those that only have gender inferences in the presuppositional dimension of meaning, and (c) those that do not have gender inferences in their semantics but through competition with the opposite gender (gender competition).