The Representation of Gender and Inflectional Class in Italian: A Reply to Kučerová 2018

Abstract

Kučerová (2018) puts forward a novel theory of the morphology and interpretation of nominal gender in Italian. Here, we take issue with this theory from both empirical and theoretical standpoints. We first show that several generalizations presented as empirical support for it are incorrect. We then point out three fundamental theoretical challenges. First, the proposed three-way classification of nouns does not represent the full range of facts, because it does not take into account plural morphology or the interdependencies of class and gender features. Second, the account of gender mismatch in terms of “semiconservativity” fails to capture the Italian data, once the full paradigm is considered. Finally, the use of phase theory to model contextual valuation of gender faces an insurmountable lookahead problem.