Syntax of the Nominal Domain

Abstract This work investigates the morphosyntax of nominal expressions in Standard Italian that have multiple adjectives in ‘split coordination’, which permits a plural noun to
be modified by singular adjectives, e.g. le mani destra e sinistra (the hand.pl left.sg and right.sg). The proposal is i) that these expressions are built from multidominant structures, with a constituent shared by the conjuncts, and ii) that plural marking on the noun reflects ‘summative’ feature resolution on the nP comparable to coordination resolution. This pro- posal captures various properties of split-coordinated expressions, including the availability of adjective stacking and of feature-mismatched conjuncts, as well as agreement with a class of nouns that ‘switch’ gender in the plural. Taking agreement with resolving features to be a form of semantic agreement, which has been argued to be possible only in certain syntac- tic configurations (Smith 2015, 2017, 2021), the account captures prenominal/postnominal adjective asymmetries in split coordination. The work offers a coherent account of coordina- tion and semantic agreement in the nominal domain, connects split coordination to related phenomena such as nominal RNR and adjectival hydras, and more broadly, evinces the unity of nominal and verbal agreement, pace analyses of nominal concord (Norris 2014).

The grammatical gender of a noun can be sensitive to a number of different factors, including the noun’s lexical semantics, nominalizing morphology, or arbitrary requirements imposed by particular roots (e.g. Corbett 1991, Kramer 2020), though the limits on possible factors are not currently understood, with some work proposing that a noun’s gender can even be valued ‘at a distance’ via agreement with other nominals. The current study explores the understudied phenomenon of gender-possession interactions (Evans 1994), investigating whether being possessed, or being possessable, can have an impact on which gender a noun is assigned. Evidence is provided from four unrelated languages supporting the existence of such interactions. Strikingly, however, these interactions are restricted to INALIENABLE possession; no such interactions have been identified for ALIENABLE possession. We propose that this falls out from a general Gender Locality Hypothesis (GLH), which restricts the domain of gender assignment within a phrase nP. TheGLH captures the gender asymmetry between ‘local’, inalienable possessors introduced within nP, and ‘nonlocal’, alienable possessors introduced outside of nP, e.g. in a phrase PossP (Alexiadou 2003, Myler 2016). The GLH also makes further predictions for other features with respect
to what may or may not factor into gender assignment, severely restricting or outright prohibiting gender assignment effects from number, definiteness, and case. Broadly, the work expands our understanding of which types of elements can be relevant to gender assignment and sheds light on underexplored gender-, possession-, and agreement-related phenomena.