On the exponence of gender in the Irish DP

Provided by the author(s) and University College Dublin Library in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite the published version when available. Title On the exponence of gender in the Irish DP Authors(s) Acquaviva, Paolo Publication date 2018-03 Publication information Merchant J., Mikkelsen L., Rudin D., Sasaki K. (eds.). A reasonable way to proceed: Essays in honor of Jim McCloskey Publisher Linguistics Research Center, University of California Santa Cruz Link to online version https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7z29n70x Item record/more information http://hdl.handle.net/10197/10320 Downloaded 2021-11-27T20:36:27Z The UCD community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters! (@ucd_oa) © Some rights reserved. For more information, please see the item record link above. On the exponence of gender in the Irish DP* Paolo Acquaviva University College Dublin � I����������� ��� ������������� �.� G���� For a language with two gender values, Irish has a surprising amount of morphological variation and instability, which emerges when looking closely at the dialects which collectively make up the language. We owe to Ó Siadhail (����) an early formulation of the problem, which identi�ed the key aspects of this irregularity: some nouns vary in gender value across dialects, some have alternative values in the same dialect, some display genitive endings that are characteristic of one gender value but trigger a mutation on following adjectives that expresses the other value, and some have di�erent values (evidenced by the form of the article) in the nominative and in the genitive. In addition, the choice of the gender value for pronouns anaphoric to a DP is often not dictated by morphological agreement with the antecedent but determined on semantic grounds. The following sections will illustrate these categories with several examples; however, since more recent research has considerably sharpened the picture, my main goal will not be to describe the phenomenon. I will rather address the question of what these data can tell us about the competence underlying such puzzling behaviour. A truly satisfactory theory would model the Irish competence in such a way as to predict the boundaries of non-deterministic variation: where gender may fail to determine a certain spell-out, where it may not, and above all, why this is so. As a contribution towards that goal, this paper aims to show that the instability in the exponence of gender in the Irish DP coexists with a signi�cant core of systematicity. This can only be appreciated if we draw a clear distinction between the two types of exponence in question, namely initial mutation (mainly lenition) and phonologically overt exponents. The latter, namely articles and nominalizing su�xes, act as overt exponents which directly spell out a gender value. Initial mutation, on the other hand, is a piece of the Irish morphological system (a morphome, in the sense introduced by Arono� ����; see Luís and Bermúdez-Otero ����) which has several functions, only one of which * The work of James McCloskey has been an inspiration for many people, and I am one of them. I would like to express my thanks to him for all he has done and for what he has meant for so many. � is the marking of a con�guration of gender agreement inside DP. Its realization is subject to a number of constraints, particularly complex in the case of the complement of a lexical noun. It is this relation between mutation and gender agreement that is subject to a signi�cant weakening; when gender has a di�erent realization, its systematic morphological realizations are stable. An empirically successful theory must account for this state of a�airs. �.� I���� � H�� ���� �������? Not many grammatical properties can be attributed to Irish as a unitary system of native linguistic competence, and gender marking is not one of them. It is true that all modern varieties oppose two gender values, through a system of morphological oppositions which is clearest in pronouns. It is also true that the exponents for articles and nouns/adjectives are uniformly the same, namely lenition and choice of a special feminine form for some lexical items (including the article); and that the bulk of nouns continues to have the gender value it had in previous historical phases, making allowance for the disappearance of the neuter (predictably, old neuters �gure frequently in the list of nouns whose gender value does not align with that of other varieties). Still, we cannot analyze the morphology of gender in Irish as if it was a subpart of a single linguistic system. Irish is a set of native dialects surrounded by a much greater number of speakers with varying standards of �uency, most of whom look to the o�cial standard as a reference point. When we approach Irish as an I-language, the store of tacit knowledge which constitutes native competence, the problems come into focus. If descriptions are su�ciently detailed, they display a signi�cant amount of nouns whose gender value varies; it is not rare to �nd nouns which must be described as having both gender values. The same unusual variability often characterizes the initial lenition which feminine nouns would normally trigger on a following adjective. Particularly signi�cant are cases where usage is explicitly said to be inconsistent: to consider a single example, Ó hUiginn (����: ���) reports that in Connacht Irish cleachtadh ‘habit, practice’ is shown to be masculine by the lack of lenition after the de�nite article (an cleachtadh) but as feminine by the lenition it triggers on the onset of a following adjective like ‘good’ (cleachtadh mhaith) (also noted in Ó Siadhail ����: ���). A model of the native competence of individuals and speech communities, then, cannot just deterministically link gender value and certain patterns of exponence, without also making room for this sort of variability. For this reason, our empirical focus will be not on how gender is expressed in any one variety, but how much in this exponence can fail to be expressed, or the extent to which non-deterministic choices are tolerated. Our goal is to obtain a sharper picture of the extent of this grey area — in particular, to determine its boundaries. � �.� G���������� ��� �������� ������ Discussion of gender in Irish is typically bound up with the issue of “semantic” gender assignment in pronominal anaphora: while a pronoun referring to a preceding DP generally takes the same gender value, this can be overridden. In (�), the DP cailín deas is grammatically masculine (as shown by the lack of initial lenition on the adjective deas),� but it is resumed by a feminine pronoun í; and in (�), the noun ainm ‘name’ is preceded by the feminine variant of the article an, which does not insert a -t- in front of the initial vowel, yet the pronoun resuming it is the masculine é (both examples from Ó Sé ����: ��):� (�) Cailín deas is ea í girl nice ��� ���� ���.� She is a nice girl. (�) Is é an ainm a bhí uirthi ná Móire ��� ���.� the name ��� be.��� on.���.� ��� Móire Her name was Móire. This phenomenon is undoubtedly signi�cant, but it concerns the choice of a gender value in anaphora, as opposed to its realization in DP. Like the well-known parallel phenomena in languages like German (das [neuter] Mädchen ... sie [fem.], ‘the girl ... she’), it shows that a value arising from the interpretation of DP can override the value determined (syntax-internally) by agreement between D and N, when it comes to determining the gender value imposed by a DP to a referentially dependent pronoun. However, this does not mean that the gender of D is chosen on the basis of meaning, rather than on the basis of grammatical agreement with N. It is the value of DP as a whole, as agreement controller, which in such cases is determined semantically; but D itself is regularly realized according to the value determined by N: das Mädchen, never *die [fem] Mädchen. This is not a particularly insightful or novel observation, but it should be remembered in order to avoid taking facts like (�)-(�) as evidence that grammatical gender is superseded by semantic gender. As the in-depth discussion of Lindau (����) makes clear, it is better to think that the featural makeup on D in such cases has the full complement of values, those determined by morphological agreement (“concord”) and those determined by semantics (“index”; Lindau ����: ��� usefully explains it as ‘the grammaticalized content of the semantic denotation of the noun’). Since cases like (�)-(�) are quite frequently reported for all varieties of Irish, the conclusion to draw is that pronominal anaphora often disregards the morphological marking on D but this marking is still there. It bears stressing that the pattern shown in (�)-(�) is not evidence that a gender value is attributed on the basis of “natural” gender, as if it was an objective categorization opposed to a language-internal one. This is because nouns for inani� Cailín is grammatically regularly masculine, despite its meaning, because it is formed with -ín, which is here a noun-forming su�x and not a noun-modifying diminutive one; see �.� below). � I use the following abbreviations: ��� = copula, � = feminine, ��� = genitive, M = masculine, ���� = possessive, ��� = particle, ��� = Past. � mates too can enforce or favour feminine agreement with pronominal anaphora, as (�) shows with the noun ainm. The personalization of inanimate nouns like bád ‘boat’, carr ‘car’, geansaí ‘jersey’, and even of recent borrowings like rólar ‘roller’, all referred to by feminine pronouns, was one of the subcategories identi�ed by Ó Siadhail (����: ���) for inanimate nouns, alongside non-personalized cases like áit ‘place’ and uair ‘hour’ which are resumed by masculine pronouns despite being grammatical feminine. But there is nothing “natural” in associating feminine with certain inanimate referents: semantics does play a role in gender assignment, but it is not extra-linguistic properties of the referents that determine a value. Having clari�ed the role of the semantic motivation of gender value in pronominal anaphora, I will now focus on the grammatical, language-internal aspects of this category; in particular, on the determination and expression of gender value inside DP. � T�� ��������� ������� �.� G����� ���������� �� DP: ��� ���� ������� Outside of the pronominal system, the masculine-feminine opposition has a morphological realization in the singular of the de�nite article (Irish has no inde�nite article, and there is no gender opposition in the plural), and in the shape of attributive adjectives agreeing with the noun. Articles de�ne the paradigm shown and exempli�ed in (�): (�) de�nite article Nominative/accusative case an masculine Genitive case an + lenition of following consonant (when applicable) an t- before vowels an t- before initial san + lenition of following consonant (when applicable) na feminine an t- before s + vowel or sonorant �� na h- before a vowel masculine feminine Nominative/accusative case an bata ‘the stick’ Genitive case an bhata ‘of the stick’ an t-athair ‘the father’ an athar ‘of the father’ an saol ‘the life’ an chiaróg ‘the beetle’ an tsaoil ‘of the life’ na ciaróge ‘of the beetle’ an tseiod ‘the jewel’ na seiode ‘of the jewel’ an aimsir ‘the weather’ na haimsire ‘of the weather’ The contextual changes triggered by the articles interact with the in�ectional variability of lexical stems, so that for example seoid becomes seoide in the genitive. Adjectives have their own in�ectional behaviour: some are invariable, others change in form depending on number, and some depending on gender too. A more general, and for us more relevant, exponent of gender for adjectives is the lenition of the initial consonant, which accompanies feminine singular attributive adjectives. Given the order ‘article – noun – adjective’, the lenition on the adjective can be seen both as a marker of DP-internal feminine agreement, and as an e�ect of the linearly preceding noun. Some illustrations are provided in (�): (�) Masculine noun + adjective a. an fear mór – an fhir mhóir ‘the big man – of the big man’ b. an fear maith – an fhir mhaith ‘the good man – of the good man’ c. an scéal cáiliúil – an scéal chailiúil story’ ‘the famous story – of the famous Feminine noun + adjective a. an tseoid bheag – na seoide bhige jewel’ ‘the small jewel’ – ‘of the small b. an bhean cháiliúil – na mná cailiúla ‘the famous woman – of the famous woman’ c. an aimsir Éireannach – na haimsire Éireannaí of the Irish weather’ �.� ‘the Irish weather – G����� ���������� �� DP: ��� ����� ������� The phenomena that make the morphology of gender in Irish DPs less than systematic can be summarized under the following three headings: • oscillations in gender value for nouns • oscillations in gender value for a given noun, according to case �� • misalignment of the exponents of feminine gender (lenition and realized morphology) The �rst heading does not refer to cases where an opposition in gender expresses two semantically distinct readings, distinguishing what can be legitimately viewed as two homonymous, in�ectionally identical nouns (like mám, masculine as ‘mountain pass’, feminine as ‘handful’, or ráth, masculine as ‘earthen rampart’, feminine as ‘shoal of �sh’; Ó Curnáin ����: ��� identi�es such a semantic split between the masculine and the feminine use of méid, respectively as ‘amount’ and ‘size’). The oscillation consists instead in nouns that have the same meaning but can occur with either gender value. This sort of anomaly is prominent enough to have been recorded even in descriptions of the (arti�cially codi�ed) standard. The o�cial standard originally issued in ���� (an Caighdeán Oi�giúil, CO), followed by the o�cial ���� dictionary by Ó Dónaill, mentions distinct genitive forms of the masculine talamh ‘earth’, namely the masculine talaimh and the feminine talún. What is an isolated exception in the standard, however, takes di�erent proportions in the dialects, which alone re�ect native states of linguistic competence. Ó Siadhail (����: ���) lists the following examples of nouns that are masculine in some dialects but feminine in others: (�) N��� ainm ‘name’ asal ‘donkey’ condae ‘county’ mí ‘month’ páighe ‘pay’ ��������, N �� ���� Donegal, Connacht Donegal Connacht, Kerry Munster Munster ��������, N �� F�� Munster Connacht, Munster Muskerry, Donegal Donegal, Connacht Donegal, Connacht Some other cases involve very minor changes in form: (�) gaineamh ‘sand’ paráiste ‘parish’ tubaiste ‘disaster’ Connacht, Teelin Connacht, Kerry Donegal, Connacht Erris, Munster (gainimh) Muskerry (paróiste), Donegal Munster (tubaist) More speci�c descriptions reveal more cases where the gender value in one dialect contrasts with the value of others, or the ‘standard’ (typically in the sense of all other varieties). In his overview of Munster varieties, Ua Suilleabháin (����) discusses among other discrepancies the feminine ainm ‘noun, name’, dlí ‘law’, guth ‘voice’, srian ‘bridle’. For Ulster, Hughes (����: ���) reports that tír ‘land, country’ is usually feminine but fails to lenite the following adjective in the �xed phrase tír mór ‘mainland’. More interesting are the cases where both gender values are reported as current, in the same dialectal area: Ua Súilleabháin mentions iúna ‘wonder’, brí ‘strength’ (fem. in Corca Dhuibhne, masc. or fem. in Muskerry), and the series of loanwords tae ‘tea’, siúcra ‘sugar’, and béile ‘meal’; in addition, he mentions loch ‘lake’, which Ó Siadhail (����: ���) calls ‘a particularly good example’, where ‘the genitive singular �uctuates from dialect to dialect between the feminine na locha, na loiche and the masculine an locha with no discernible pattern’. As for �� the Connacht dialect, the classic description of the variety of Cois Fharraige by de Bhaldraithe (����) states on its very �rst page that a few nouns have two genders, listing the following examples: aistir ‘journey’, cleachtadh ‘habit, practice’, deatach ‘smoke’, éisteacht ‘hearing’, eolas ‘knowledge’, fad ‘length’, leabhar ‘book’, méid ‘amount, size’, oiread ‘amount’, talamh ‘earth’. The overview of Connacht dialects by Ó hUiginn (����: ���) also discusses am ‘time’, and adds the observation ‘like some of these words, they take the masculine form of the article, but often the feminine form of the adjective after them, for example an cleachtadh but cleachtadh mhaith, an t-eolas but eolas mhaith’ [translation PA]. Ó Siadhail (����: ���) noticed that this irregular feminine pattern of lenition triggered by a usually masculine noun takes place in the absence of an article: It is signi�cant that in all the examples I have found of a lenited adjective following an otherwise masculine noun the noun is always inde�nite. I have come across no examples such as *an aistir mhaith, *an eolas maith. As we will see directly, however, even this subregularity proves less than absolute when the analysis is more detailed. The more recent and vastly more detailed (four volumes) single-dialect description by Ó Curnáin (����) features far longer lists, with �ve pages devoted to nouns that are feminine and three pages for nouns that are masculine in the Connacht dialect described, but have the opposite value elsewhere or in closely related dialects (vol. I, ���-���, ���-���). In several of the nouns listed, masculine or feminine are in fact both recorded. The next two headings are more important. Ó Curnáin (����) explicitly discusses the pattern of ‘gender dependent on case’ (p. ���), where a noun has the morphology of one value in the nominative/accusative case but that of the opposite value in the genitive. For instance, leabhar ‘book’ is regularly masculine in the genitive, but which can be masculine or also feminine in the nominative/accusative (the example produced is an leabhar dhubh sin ‘that black book’. Ó Curnáin also mentions talamh ‘earth’, trinse ‘trench’, and especially in �xed collocations am ‘time’, scéal ‘story’, and Gleann ‘valley’, the last in a placename). Even more striking is the simultaneous presence of masculine and feminine morphology side by side. Such is the case of cleachtadh, which ‘takes the masculine article, i.e. an cleachtadh, but like a feminine noun, lenites a following adjective. This is very common in the phrase without the article cleachtadh mhaith’ (Ó Curnáin ����: ���). The same happens with iomaire ‘ridge’, in the phrase an t-iomaire mhór ‘the big ridge’ (Ó Curnáin ����: ���; masculine article, feminine lenition on the adjective mór; this represents a counterexample to the generalization tentatively put forward in Ó Siadhail ����). What matters, then, is not so much that a few or many words vary in gender assignment across the dialects (in itself, a natural state of a�airs), but that the exponence of gender value is often irregular and sometimes inconsistent, to the point of making it problematic whether a noun really has a unique gender value in a single, quite homogeneous dialectal variety, or indeed in individual competences. Ó Curnáin (����: ���-���) is explicit on this point when noting, for in�� stance, that ‘in query both sábh maith and sábh mhaith were o�ered’ [‘good saw’, masculine and feminine respectivelyPA], or that a speaker is hesitant between an iascach and an t-iascach [‘�shing, �shery’] and ‘actually self-corrects’. This last example should be related to the masculine an t- in the phrase an t-iomaire mhór, mentioned a few lines above. Together, they show that the instability does not concern just the juncture between noun and adjective, but also that between article and noun. It is interesting that most cases of exceptional, irregular feminine lenition by a noun are attested when the noun is not preceded by an article, as noted by Ó Siadhail; but this is only a tendency and does not seem to be mandated by some grammatical principle. �.� O���� ��� ������� �������� The corpus study of Frenda (����) adds another dimension to these interim conclusions. It contrasts the marking of feminine gender in two corpora, one ‘older’, linguistically conservative (it is a selection from the ���� study edited by Wigger ����), and one ‘contemporary’, taken from Raidió na Gaeltachta (Irish-language state broadcasting station) and other media sources between ���� and ����. One important result that emerges from this comparison study is �rst of all the sharp increase in semantically-based pronominal anaphora, where a pronoun resumes a DP using the gender motivated by the corresponding discourse referent and not by the grammatical gender of DP. This datum, however signi�cant in itself, does not impinge on the status of gender morphology inside DP. More relevant here is that the contemporary corpus evidences a decrease in feminine agreement between article and noun, with ��% of the cases (��� out of ���). By contrast, the percentages of correct article agreement in the older corpus were ��% for masculine and ��% for feminine, and more signi�cantly, also the contemporary corpus showed correct masculine agreement in ��% of the cases.� By agreement is meant the congruence between form of the article and assumed gender of the noun; this does not distinguish between initial mutation (lenition, t-pre�xation) and shape of the article itself (an or na). The sharpest mismatch between the two corpora concerns gender agreement on attributive adjectives. Frenda notes that these are infrequent in both, and in practice display agreement (feminine) only by means of initial lenition, since only eleven tokens in both corpora displayed agreement by a distinct stem form (six and �ve for the older and the contemporary respectively). After again disaggregating a few proper names, the di�erence between the two corpora is stark: adjectives agree in feminine gender (i.e. are lenited) with a feminine noun controller �� times out of �� in the older corpus, or in ��% of cases, but only � times out of �� in the contemporary one, or in ��% of the cases. Incidentally, even ‘masculine agreement’, which in this case is simply lack of any marking, is not ���% in either corpus: �� out of �� times and �� out of �� times). Some caution is needed before drawing conclusions from Frenda’s �gures, of course, and not only because the relevant potential agreement targets are a small � Proper names were disaggregated and shown to be not statistically signi�cant. �� number (the results are statistically relevant within the corpus, but we cannot a priori know how representative the sample is of the spoken Irish of the relevant generations). Firstly, in the light of the variation in gender assignment for nouns shown by Ó Curnáin (����) (occasionally even with the same speaker), some instances of wrong agreement might simply go back to a non-standard gender assignment. Secondly, the data con�ate together initial mutation and choice of article form, but the two types of exponents might be partly decoupled (I will develop this suggestion later on). The lack of lenition on adjective or noun is taken as correct masculine agreement, in the appropriate context; but it could as well signal the lack of any morphological marking, as Frenda acknowledges in response to a referee (he also adds, correctly, that the gender opposition would still be morphologically active, in view of the other cases). This observation generalizes: in many cases gender may simply fail to be expressed, something which Ó Curnán (����: ���) also draws attention to by pointing out that ‘cases of nonlenition are often ambiguous as to gender, particularly when there is a possibility of homorganic nonlenition’. Still, two important results remain: �rst, lenition of an attributive adjective after a feminine noun seems decidedly recessive; second, this contrasts with the realization of agreement between noun and article (in both forms it takes, lenition noun and form na of the article), which also fails sometimes but generally holds its ground. The tendency towards nonlenition of attributive adjectives after feminine nouns contrasts with the situation reported by Ó Curnáin (����: ����) for a homogeneous local variety: ‘Feminine singular nouns, not in�ected for genitive case, regularly lenite attributive adjectives, less regularly nouns.’ We should also note that a case like an t-iomaire mhór, with masculine an-t and feminine mhór, goes against the tendency reported by Frenda (����): either the noun is masculine, and then the lenited adjective is an overapplication of feminine lenition; or it is feminine, and then what is deviant here is the agreement with the article. However, the contrast might not be as sharp as it seems. Ó Curnáin takes into account the fact that several nouns have a non-standard masculine gender value; his hinting that nonlenition could say nothing about gender is important, because Frenda’s data might follow from lenition being generally less regular in general, more than from gender not being grammatically represented. Ó Curnáin (����: ���) clearly identi�es a reduction of feminine gender marking in nominals as a feature of younger speakers (born after ����). Interestingly, however, he calls this ‘gender depletion’: it is not as if masculine and feminine were grammatically equivalent choices, and one is encroaching on the other, but rather that gender marking usually means feminine marking, and this surfaces less and less frequently. I will develop this line of interpretation, but with an important twist motivated by Frenda’s data. The fact that lenition between articles and nouns survives better than that between nouns and adjectives, in proportion (so, making allowance for the fact that the second con�guration is much less common), is not easily compatible with the idea that what is disappearing is the feminine �� gender. Because if it were so, we would expect to see a generalized rise of masculine morphology, with many more cases of ‘wrong’ masculine article in front of feminine nouns, like an t-iarnáil ‘the [masc] iron’ cited by Ó Curnáin (ibid.) for a speaker who otherwise follows the older practice of treating as feminine loanwords in -áil, like an ghesáil ‘the [fem] guessing’. � A ������ The preceding section should have made clear that gender is undoubtedly still a morphological category of Irish nominals, but its exponence has oscillations and inconsistencies which are de�nitely not usual for an in�ectional category. In particular, the fact that the morphological re�exes of feminine gender are much better preserved on articles than between nouns and adjectives, speaks against a simple interpretation of this situation as a system in �ux. Stated in these terms, the situation may be unclear, but not particularly puzzling. However, two facts make it harder to make sense of it. �.� N� ������ ����������� ���� ������������ �������� The �rst is that some nominalizing su�xes determine a grammatical gender value for the DP in a way that does not admit overriding, no matter how unstable gender morphology might be (cf. already Ó Siadhail ����). Of course, many nouns that are not (or no longer synchronically analyzed as) su�xed also have just one �xed gender value across all dialects. But when a value is associated to a su�x, rather than a lexical noun, it is a grammatical fact about the morphology of the language as a system, not a separate piece of knowledge for each word the su�x appears in. Establishing exactly which su�xes do and don’t allow gender variation would obviously be a major undertaking, across all dialects. But some candidates can be advanced with con�dence: the agentive -eir, -eara, -óir (-tóir, -teoir, -adóir), -í, -ire would seem to be consistently masculine; the individualizing -án seems also regularly masculine, while -óg is its feminine counterpart (see Ó Siadhail ����: ��� for a similar list). Ó Curnáin’s (����: ���-���, ���-���) �vepage and three-page lists of irregularly feminine and masculine nouns notably lack items with those su�xes, in contrast to other su�xes (like those deriving abstract nouns in ú, -acht, -as) which admit either gender value. Cases like altóir ‘altar’, buaí ‘buoy’, and ráipéar ‘rapier’ are clear loanwords, where the ending is arguably not a separate su�x in the structure of the word. The one exception is scológ ‘freeholder farmer’ (p. ���), which however is attested as masculine only in the compound versions seanscológ and scoloigín. In sum, although stating that certain su�xes never admit alternative gender values is very easy to disprove, I will claim that at least some su�xes indeed have this property. The feminine -ó is probably the safest, and the clearest illustration. It used to be a diminutive, as shown by pairs like both ‘hut’ - bothóg ‘shanty, cabin’ (beside bothán), but it is no longer productive in that capacity (Doyle ����: ���-���). Its function is that of �� deriving nouns for individual entities characterized as small, from nouns (as in bábóg ‘doll’ from báb ‘baby’, or béalóg ‘gap, muzzle, mouthful’ from béal ‘mouth’) or from adjectives (bog ‘soft’ - bogóg ‘shell-less egg’; ciar ‘dark’ - ciaróg ‘beetle’). It is consistently feminine. Derivations like meabhróg ‘thoughtful girl’ from meabhair ‘mind’ or plandóg ‘shapely woman’ from planda ‘plant’ suggest a female-denoting function; however, Ó Curnáin’s overview of Irish word formation (����: ����) explicitly characterizes it as predominantly ‘non-personal’, adding that it is particularly common in Ulster varieties (some examples are tonnóg ‘duck’, beachóg ‘bee’, sopóg ‘sheaf’, bachóg ‘sprout’). In sum, a reasonably common noun-forming su�x expresses the feminine gender value consistently and yet independently of semantic motivation (it is compatible with, but not restricted to, female reference).� But then it is not nouns in general, as a lexical category, which are losing gender as a lexically �xed grammatical property. �.� N� ����������� ����� A second consideration that points in the same direction is not just morphological but also semantic in nature. It seems to be a fact (a claim subject to falsi�cation) that Irish simply lacks what Harris (����) called ‘mated nouns’. These are pairs of nouns for animate referents which have the same stem, but opposed gender values corresponding to male and female reference. The two nouns may di�er in in�ection, like the Spanish el niño - la niña ‘the boy - the girl’, or have identical shape but only di�er in gender value, like Spanish el testigo - la testigo ‘the (male) witness - the (female) witness’ or French le journaliste - la journaliste. Bearing in mind the variability of gender assignment we have seen, it is striking that person- or animal-denoting nouns should not be the most likely candidates for creating gender-opposed pairs. Yet, of all nouns that can be masculine or feminine (most inanimates), none to my knowledge has turned into a lexical pair where the gender value strictly corresponds to biological sex. In fact, some facts suggest precisely that the gender of D cannot be decoupled from that of N and based on the reference of DP. One of the nominalizations in -óg just discussed is piteog ‘e�eminate man, sissy’, from pit ‘vulva’ (Ó Curnáin ����: ����). De Bhaldraithe (����: �) also mentions this derivation (translated in the glossary as ‘man interested in women’s a�airs’), adding that this is a ‘word which is only said with men’ [translation PA]; it immediately precedes another derivation where grammatical gender con�icts with natural gender, namely raibiléara ‘harlot’, a masculine derivation which ‘is only said with women’. A noun like piteog, referring to an animate individual which is necessarily male (as a matter of lexical concept, not accidentally) is surely the best candidate for having semantic gender override grammatical gender. Yet this does not seem to happen (see also bológ mentioned in footnote �). These cases parallel the Italian derogatory feminine term checca ‘e�eminate male homosexual’ which Percus (����: ���) recognizes as incompatible with his generalization that, in Italian, nouns entailing � Ó Curnáin (����: ����) also mentions the Ulster loanword bológ ‘bullock’ (a male referent). �� maleness (unlike ‘person’) are feminine.� The conclusion is clear: Irish grammar cannot just select the gender value of a DP on the basis of the semantic motivation of gender assignment. No matter how unstable gender morphology might be, the semantic value expressed on D cannot be detached from the value morphologically expressed on N; there is no le / la journaliste.� The puzzle, then, stands in these terms. On the one hand, the gender assignment of nouns is unstable in signi�cant parts of the nominal lexicon, and feminine gender marking shows signs of being quite often suspended speci�cally on nouns, as opposed to articles. On the other hand, there are no signs that grammatical gender on nouns is being replaced by a semantically-determined assignment of value based on the reference of DP; on the contrary, Irish lacks constructions where gender is determined at DP level overriding the grammatical gender on the noun, something which happens in other languages. � M����� (����) ����� �� ��� ������ The solution I propose is more a reinterpretation, which seeks to do justice to the generalizations considered, than an explanation of all the data. It rests on two assumptions: • gender is a grammatical property of Irish nouns, also represented on articles and adjectives by agreement • nouns are not syntactic atoms, but have an internal structure which is syntactically represented The �rst assumption states that, despite all signs of instability, gender should still be seen as a grammatical feature operative inside DP, and has not been reduced to an English-style DP-level categorization for referents. This was motivated in the previous sections and will not be argued for in what follows. We can now focus on the second proposition. � Percus (����: ���) opts to keep the generalization but interpret the entailment as referring to entities that are ‘either females or like females in certain relevant respects’. This plays down the fact that such terms highlight precisely the contrast between the referent and the gender value of the noun: the fact that the noun refers to males is not linguistically irrelevant but essential for lexical meaning. � The apparent lack of ‘mated nouns’ is one of the factors that make it di�cult to resort to ellipsis phenomena to investigate the status of gender on nouns. In the general absence of pairs where gender minimally distinguishes readings like ‘uncle-aunt’, ‘male-female teacher’, or ‘actor-actress’, we cannot use patterns like ‘He is a good N���� , but she is also [a good N��� ] to test whether the gender marking can be teased apart from the noun under ellipsis (see Merchant ���� for a study of Greek which concludes that not only does the status of gender di�erent across lexical classes, but ellipsis itself is in fact two distinct phenomena). Another factor is that the Irish pronominal equivalent of ‘one’ is ceann, which to my knowledge is never sensitive to the gender of its antecedent. That said, it is likely that a study of noun ellipsis in Irish will �nd alternative ways to bring some facts to bear on the issue. I thank Jason Merchant for this insightful suggestion, which I cannot pursue here (but might be pursued by others). �� �.� T�� ������ �� ������������ �������� The second assumption addresses the theoretical question posed by su�xes like -óg. Plainly, there are su�xes that impose a gender value; the problem is how to model the observation that the value in these cases is stable, while in other cases (nouns built with other su�xes or underived) it is not. If we assume, with Borer (����) and Harley (����) (and by now many others), that lexical categories like nouns are by de�nition structurally complex objects built around a categoryfree root, we can follow De Belder, Faust, and Lampitelli (����), and Déchaine et al. (����) and analyze diminutives in nominalizing function as realizations of a morpheme that quali�es the root as a noun. Since such diminutive-nominalizers often specify a count interpretation (cf. French glace ‘ice’ - glaçon ‘ice cube/fragment’; German Brot ‘bread’ - Brötchen ‘bread roll’; Italian zucchero ‘sugar’ - zuccherino ‘sugar cube’), we can associate it with the general function of ‘Division of reference’ in Borer’s (����) structure. In Irish, as in other languages, these morphemes impose a gender value to the noun. When the same -óg morpheme expresses only a diminutive content, as in cnapóg ‘little lump’ from cnap ‘lump’, it is still marked as feminine (as a morphological property of the a�x) but it realizes a higher evaluative node. This is schematically represented in (�) and (�): (�) [ D ... [ Number ... [Evaluation ... [ Division ... root ]]]] -óg [Fem] ciar(�) [ D ... [ Number ... [Evaluation ... [ Division ... root ]]]] -óg[Fem] cnapDéchaine et al. (����) and De Belder, Faust and Lampitelli (����) have pursued the same insight, centred on an inner and an outer locus for diminutive morphemes (with relevant di�erences: the latter source, in particular, cogently argues that the innermost diminutive appear on other categories too, and so are not really nominalizers). These analyses converge on distinguishing two functions for diminutives, noun-forming and noun-modifying; and it stands to reason that the former should determine a gender value. The nominalizer -óg, then, acts like a light noun which encodes feminine. The same holds of those su�xes that rigidly correlate with one gender value. Other nouns lack this type of morpheme: either they contain nominal su�xes which do not unambiguously specify a gender value, or they have no distinct morphemes in their structure. In this case, a gender value is associated with the whole complex that makes up the noun, but without being the content of any speci�c morpheme (I will return to lenition directly); in short, gender has no direct exponent, as these nouns do not formally encode their gender value through a grammatical element. When the association with a gender value is a property of the whole word, it can be reinforced by regularities in form, like the often-cited tendency to associate palatal word endings with feminine, or in meaning, as in e�ects of semantic contiguity (so that a noun may take over the gender of a semantically close noun). But these are generalizations that arise �� from the usage of words, sharply di�erent in nature from gender-form pairings that are explicitly part of the grammar. This, then, is what the articles and gender-speci�c su�xes have in common: they both directly spell out a gender value (in addition to the rest of their content). By contrast, the noun endings compatible with masculine or feminine may be more or less strongly associated to one value, but they do not realize it as an exponent realizes a grammatical feature. �.� I������ ���������: L������� Initial mutations, and speci�cally lenition, have di�erent properties, which make it a di�erent type of exponent than a segmental morpheme like the su�x -óg or the form of the genitive article na. Like nasalization, lenition is a multi-purpose marker used to express a variety of grammatical contents, triggered by morphemes as diverse as preverbal particles, lexical verbs, prenominal particles (possessive and vocative), articles, and lexical nouns.� There are lexical exceptions in some of these uses, and especially in the case at hand it is not always clear whether a noun displays no lenition (on its onset, following the article an, or on the onset of a following adjective) because it is masculine rather than feminine as expected, or because lenition simply fails to apply (see Ó Curnain’s ���� comment cited above in section �.�). The issue is further complicated by subregularities like the fact that adjectives in placenames are often unlenited (Leitir Mór, Sraith Salach, cited by de Bhaldraithe ����: ���; see �.� below). In addition, the realization of initial mutation is sensitive to linearity in a way that sets it clearly apart from segmental exponents. It is well known that an intervening adverb blocks the regular lenition induced on the adjective maith ‘good’ by a feminine noun like Gaeilge ‘Irish (language)’, as shown in (�); however, Ó Siadhail (����: ���) contrasts this intervention e�ect with a datum like (��) from the Donegal variety (in the context of a discussion about ‘continued lenition’ which is described as happening ‘in a few cases’): (�) Gaeilge mhaith – Gaeilge réasúnta maith Irish [���]-good – Irish reasonably [���-���]-good good Irish – reasonably good Irish (��) Gaeilge iontach mhaith Irish wonderfully [���]-good very good Irish Finally, a following adjective is lenited much more regularly than a following noun (a genitive dependent). This is because when a common noun speci�es a feminine noun (for proper names see �.� below), an asymmetry arises between expressions of a part-of relation, which do not generally lenite (as in (��)), and � Carnie (����: �) aptly distinguishes four subtypes of lenition, rather than de�ning one and then stating the idiosyncrasies that arise in di�erent morphosyntactic contexts. �� other genitive constructions which do (as in (��); both taken from de Bhaldraithe ����: ���-���): (��) Adharc pocaide horn billy-goat.��� A billigoat’s horn (��) Deoch bhainne drink milk.��� A drink of milk This asymmetry is well documented, and indicates that the lenition on a dependent noun must be sensitive to syntactic and semantic factors which break down this con�guration into a number of distinct subcases; see de Bhaldraithe (����: ���-���), Ó Siadhail (����: ���), Ó Sé (����: ��-��), and especially Ó Curnáin (����: ����-����). The distribution is complicated and probably less than systematic, since de Bhaldraithe also lists on the same page aimsir gaoith anoir ‘weather of-wind from East’, with no lenition, and aimsir bháistí ‘weather of-rain’, with lenition. Whatever underlying pattern explains the alternating presence and absence of lenition in this con�guration, in the sources just mentioned it re�ects a genuine property of native linguistic competence. This stands out clearly when it is contrasted with the occurrence of lenition on adjectives, as witnessed in the same sources. For these reasons, I will set aside the whole issue of lenition marking on a dependent genitive noun, which varies according to independent (if, for this writer, unclear) syntactic and semantic factors. What matters more directly for the question of gender marking is instead the lenition of attributive adjectives; and in this connection we have seen that lenition is relatively regular in traditional varieties, but is infrequent and shows strong signs of collapsing judging by the data in Frenda (����). All of these properties suggest that lenition has an indirect relation with the realization of gender; not only because it also realizes other grammatical contents, but because even as an exponent of gender it prone to being omitted, or overgeneralized, or realized only on one link of the agreement chain rather than on all agreeing elements. Gender involves the choice of forms in an agreement con�guration, and gender values identify agreement classes. There is, then, a purely morphological side to it (the forms selected) and a syntactic side (the agreement con�guration). In syntactic terms, we can represent the structure containing the noun controller and the two potential targets for gender agreement in the following standard notation, where the controller values the feature representations of the targets D and Adj (I specify the case on D as genitive, but it could be nominative/accusative): (��) [ D[Gen:__,Num__,Case:Geniti�e] ] [ N[Gen:Fem,Num:Sg] Adj[Gen:__,Num__] ]] → [ D[Gen:Fem,Num:Sg,Case:Geniti�e] ] [ N[Gen:Fem,Num:Sg] Adj[Gen:Fem,Num:Sg] ]] �� These featural representations are spelled out by the appropriate morphemes, and the lexical root in the case of N and Adj (where N is a shorthand for a more complex structure, as discussed in �.� above). A form like na realizes gender, number, and case on D (in case the feature values are feminine, singular, and genitive), but otherwise gender does not �nd a speci�c morphological realization (excepting the speci�c feminine forms of the adjective, nowadays rare, illustrated by bhige in (�) above). In particular, N lacks a dedicated exponent for this feature, unless it contains a su�x explicitly marked for a gender value, like -óg. My suggestion is that lenition should be seen as a morphological formative which is conditioned by (among other triggers) the feminine gender value on the feminine singular form of D, N, and Adj (for D, also nominative/accusative), but which can fail to be expressed even though the feature value is still syntactically present. As a secondary exponent (Noyer ����), it accompanies the morphological spellout of an abstract lexical and syntactic representation, specifying word forms in ways that can only take e�ect when the abstract representation has been linearized as seems natural for a morpheme that is only visible as a sandhi phenomenon. Lenition, as a speci�cation of word forms, is then a re�ex of the feminine gender value on a whole agreement chain, and only becomes the exponent of this feature value when no other morphemes spell it out on the same chain; for instance, in a structure like an bhean bhocht ‘the poor woman’. This, I think, is the di�erence between lenition and the more usual exponence of feminine by means of morphemes like na and -óg; it is in principle a side-e�ect of the marking [Gender: Feminine], and in this sense it is more loosely related to this marking than inherently feminine morphemes. It can, then, be subject to oscillations in use, independently of the truly feminine morphemes and of the syntactic marking [Gender: Feminine] on the whole DP (as long as this is recoverable on at least some element). So, for instance, in (��) lenition may fail to appear, while the feature value is there and conditions the choice of the article form na. In addition, lenition may surface only on some of the chain links on which it is licensed: supposing that it may appear on N but not on D (which by hypothesis is still feminine), this would model what happens in inconsistent phrases like an t-eolas (‘the knowledge’, no lenition) but eolas mhaith (‘good knowledge’, with lenition on the adjective following eolas), without needing to posit two distinct gender assignments for the noun. �.� I������ ���������: ������������ ��� �������� The idea that lenition is not a direct sign of feminine gender, and so that if it is missing it does not mean that the gender is not feminine, e�ectively would allow us to reinterpret a signi�cant part of the attested instability in gender marking as instability in the realization of the featural input, and not as genuine oscillation in gender assignment. The approach generalizes: once the principle is accepted that initial mutations are a di�erent sort of exponent from dedicated morphemes, with a looser relation to morphosyntactic features, we can look in the same way at other juncture phenomena, other than lenition, which likewise seem to denote �� an irregular choice of gender value according to the tables in (��). If a speaker hesitates between an t-iascach and an iascach (‘the �shing’) in the same utterance, as Ó Curnáin reports (����: ���), it is possible that the �rst form of the article an t-, simply recruited the prevocalic t- of the masculine as a hiatusavoiding strategy, rather than being a genuine gender marker. It certainly seems more plausible that speakers should hesitate about such sandhi phenomena, than about the gender of nouns. The same would apply to the string an t-iomaire mhór (see �.� above), where the two apparently contradictory markings appear side by side. The hypothesis that lenition may be to some extent decoupled from feminine gender is of course still compatible with the idea that feminine is simply lost in some (or many) cases. Ó Curnáin (����: ���) identi�es a tendency towards ‘gender depletion’ for younger generations of speakers, resulting in feminine being no longer realized because it is simply no longer there. There is no need to dispute this interpretation, as long as the data are compatible with a generalized masculine morphology and do not at the same time suggest that feminine is still there, but only partially expressed. The (intended) strength of the reinterpretation I have o�ered is that it allows us to account for some of these more puzzling data, not only because the lack of lenition does not automatically imply lack of feminine gender, but also because it could be D or N that fail to lenite despite being feminine. If Ulster varieties usually treat tír ‘land’ as a feminine (genitive na tíre), but feature an irregularly non-lenited adjective in the phrase tír mór ‘mainland’, literally ‘big land’ (see again �.� above), it seems more plausible that lenition is simply suspended, especially in similar collocations, rather than thinking of an unstable gender value for this noun. In particular, a generalized retreat among younger speakers from the lenition triggered by N, as opposed to that triggered by D, would model the pattern found by Frenda (����), with feminine gender agreement between N and Adj much less frequent than that between D and N (respectively ��% versus ��%, discounting the few proper names). Again I must emphasize that this is not intended to explain away all the grey areas in Irish gender marking as an only apparent puzzle, because many cases are still better viewed as inconsistent assignments of gender value. Ó hUiginn (����: ���), for a �nal example, cites for Connacht the two forms of the noun bróigín, formed by the diminutive -ín on the feminine (in -óg!) noun for ‘shoe’: in the nominative, the su�x regularly retains the gender of the base noun, resulting in the feminine an bhróigín (with lenition on N triggered by the article). But he adds that the genitive of the same noun behaves like a masculine in the phrase barr an bhróigín ‘the tip of the shoe’ where lenition appears on both nominative and genitive, so it does not surface too little but, if anything, too much; the morphologically feminine noun in question simply has a masculine genitive (in that phrase). This sort of cases might suggest that lenition too, like t-insertion, might sometimes act just like a sandhi phenomenon detached from the exponence of gender, especially in common collocations like cleachtadh mhaith. Such sequences, then, would no longer count as evidence for a feminine value of the noun. I sug�� gest that this is probably the correct interpretation in at least some cases, but with the essential quali�cation that it cannot be accepted as an explanation without independent reasons for thinking that the noun is not feminine. Otherwise, simply claiming that lenition, e�ectively, doesn’t count in some cases (the problematic ones) would deprive the proposed interpretation of all predictive power. As I don’t have independent evidence to bring to bear, I will simply mention this possibility without pursuing it. Gender marking on Irish nominals is, objectively, messy. I have proposed an interpretive framework that can help make sense of this messiness: the irregularities concern some nouns more than others because of their morphological make-up,� and they have substantially to do with lenition not appearing where it would be expected to. Alternative interpretations, especially the restatementlike position that, on the face of the facts, it is more economical to simply accept inconsistent gender assignments, should explain why this does not happen when initial mutation is not an exponent. I have not proposed that the irregularity is an epiphenomenon, but I have suggested that it would not be so common if nominal gender did not rely so much on initial mutations and other sandhi phenomena for its realization. � T������ � ����������� �������� The analytic perspective suggested faces the challenge of organizing the often inconsistent data in a coherent model of grammatical competence. As a step towards that goal, this �nal section argues that the unsystematic application of lenition is an independent fact, and it brie�y frames the analysis proposed in terms of the abstract structure of Irish nouns as morphological words. �.� T�� ����������� �� ������� �������� I have claimed that the morphology of gender in Irish nominals looks so unsystematic because its exponence relies so much on lenition, and lenition is by itself unstable as an exponent. In working towards a theoretical account of Irish nominal gender, it is important to stress that this is an independently given datum, not a stipulation. In (�)-(��) (section �.�) we hinted at the fact that lenition triggered on an adjective by a preceding noun is sensitive to linearly intervening adverb. This wellknown intervention e�ect (Ó Siadhail ����: ���) shows by itself that word-initial mutation can be suspended in a way that would be unusual for a�xal morphological markers. But it is also well known that lenition is sensitive to lexical choices. Ó Siadhail’s all-dialect overview (����: ���, ���) lists méid ‘amount’, Dé ‘day (in names of the days of the week), and tí ‘place, dwelling-place’ as regularly unlenited (see �.� above for Ó Curnáin’s more precise statement about méid); in ad� The case of bróigín, nominalized with -ín, �nds an echo in the irregularly feminine na cailín ‘of the girl’, which Ó Curnáin (����: ���) calls ‘most aberrant’. �� dition, the lenition of the attributive second noun in a sequence Noun � - Noun � [genitive] is sometimes suspended, especially in traditional petri�ed phrases like crích Banba ‘the land of Banba’, or where the �rst noun has quasi-prepositional value, as in lár mí an Meithimh ‘the middle of June’. These are �xed collocations, and therefore they have a special status; still, by itself being a �xed collocation does not necessarily cancel the internal syntactic structure of a lexicalized phrase (proper names are certainly not immune from lenition). In addition, many �xed collocations, even petri�ed as place-names, preserve genitive forms, like Drom Domhnaigh (Dromdowney), County Cork, ‘the ridge of the church’, from domhnach ‘church’ (https://www. ogainm.ie/719.aspx). These data independently con�rm the conclusion reached in the past section: lenition realizes gender in a fashion that is less regular and systematic than a�xes. It makes sense, then, to attribute a substantial role in the attested instability of nominal gender morphology to the instability of lenition (and other mutations) as a morphological marker. At least some of the puzzling cases where a noun seems to have masculine value (without lenition) after the nominative/accusative article an, and feminine (with article na, again without lenition) in the genitive, may well have this explanation. In other cases too, a noun that is syntactically marked feminine, with the corresponding forms of article, might fail to trigger lenition on a following adjective simply because lenition is suspended. This is not the explanation for all cases, as noted, but I propose it is a part of it. �.� L������� ��� ��� ������������� ��������� �� ����� We can go one more step towards a theoretical proposal. Let us not forget that the instability in question concerns not gender morphology in general but specifically the exponence of gender in DPs (in the sequence Det N Adj). But it does not extend to pre-nominal possessive particles, which in the third person involve only alternative initial mutation e�ects (except in front of vowel-initial nouns, the pronunciation of the particle a in fact coincides with that of the article forms spelled an): (��) a. A peann ���� pen Her pen b. A pheann ���� [���]pen His pen c. A bpeann ���� [���]pen Their pen Granted that lenition and initial mutations are less than totally deterministic as morphological exponents, how are we to make sense for the additional observa�� tion that this concerns so speci�cally articles, nouns, and post-nominal adjectives inside DP, but not possessives? The answer I suggest is that the Irish gender opposition is perfectly sound in the pronominal system as a determination of morphemes (including possessives) that express a referential index, but it is receding from the representation of nouns and, possibly less strongly, of articles, as morphological words. It is not as a global morphophonological phenomenon that mutations are becoming less regular (at least not for native competent speakers), but as formants in the representation of words as morphological objects; speci�cally, of nominal words, nouns and adjectives. This statement encapsulates the claim that lexical items are represented as structured symbols not only as syntactic objects, but also as abstract morphological objects which feed phonological realization. While this is assumed by, or is at least compatible with, most approaches to morphology, it is not a claim universally accepted. It is implied, for instance, by those analyses that follow Harris (����) in positing word-markers as vocalic right edges of lexical words, required for morphological well-formedness: such would be the �nal -o, for instance, which in Italian closes o� a noun endowed with the feature values of masculine and singular, like cavallo ‘horse’, but also a non-in�ected adverb like quando ‘when’. Such formants are mandated by the morphology of the language, and not by syntax or phonology, witness the numerous consonant-ending loanwords like sport or pus (also masculine and singular) which are syntactically in�ected for pronominal features but do not realize them morphologically through a vocalic ending (see Acquaviva ����). In a similar vein, we can view the initial lenition triggered by feminine singular non-genitive nouns as a constituent of a linearized morphological representation: (��) syntax ����[ f.sg] > morphology bliain[���] > phonology /b’l’i@ n’/ (+ lenition) For a word like bliain ‘year’, the information that the gender value is feminine is not encoded by a feminine a�x (or through the choice of a declension class associated with feminine by default). It rather surfaces as a juncture e�ect, as a global property of the word in certain phonological and syntactic environments. My hypothesis is that this property, represented as [LEN] in (��), is obliterated much more easily in these circumstances than in the case of nouns ending in a su�x that consistently spells out the feminine value, like -óg. The formant [LEN], in other words, is stable on words that are morphologically marked as feminine, where it is a side e�ect of feminine marking. But where a gender value is not explicitly marked by a su�x, it ends up having no direct exponence. Ultimately, this is because Irish nominal morphology does not seem to de�ne declension classes that are truly consistent in the choice of gender (see Carnie ����), especially when one considers the extremely reduced two-case paradigm and the fact that genitive forms are used less and less. Articles are di�erent. As functional words, they associate directly a featural content with a form, which is unique for a given choice of feature values. There is no lexical, word-depending variability in morphological structure. We then �� predict that lenition and other initial mutations should prove more stable as an exponent of gender agreement between article and noun, than between noun and adjectival modi�er. Still, the instances of missing or ‘wrong’ mutation triggered by articles call for some explanation, over and above the fact that lenition can be suspended. The missing piece of explanation might lie in the demorphologization of such mutations after articles, which increasingly often are used as phonotactic juncture elements rather than gender exponents. This would be consistent both with the evidence (occasional) for hesitation and inconsistent choices by speakers, and with the theoretical claim that articles should retain more robustly than lexical nouns the property of triggering a mutation on a following word onset. � C���������: G�����, ������, ��� ���������� The morphology of noun gender in Irish is signi�cantly unsystematic in the speech of the most competent native speakers. In the face of this, it makes sense to think that this category has changed its status in the morphology of the language, with a shift towards a semantically-based system. In current theoretical parlance, this would be analyzed as a shift in the role of gender from concordto index agreement (see Lindau ����). The foregoing sections have articulated reasons for believing that this seemingly plausible interpretation is not correct. Even though gender can be assigned on a semantic rather than purely morphological basis in pronominal anaphora (and even in this case, the semantic classes do not reduce to sex), a morphological gender opposition is still robust in Irish grammar, also in the morphology of articles, nouns, adjectives. The irregularity evidenced by various sources in recent varieties is an undeniable fact; but it centres, I have argued, on the distribution of initial mutations, speci�cally lenition. This suggests a weakening between this type of exponence and the expression of gender value, rather than a weakening of the gender category. The change is morphological, not morphosyntactic. A conclusion like this, correct or incorrect, could not be stated without a clear distinction between the syntactic and the morphological dimension of a phenomenon like gender. The need for both dimensions of representation, then, is the broader theoretical conclusion arising from our narrowly-focused study. More speci�cally, I have claimed that the abstract representation of a word that feeds phonological spell-out, with its full complement of features, can di�er from the representation we know as ‘morphological word’. It is not just that lenition may fail to apply; it may fail to apply especially when its trigger is a lexical noun. I have proposed that this re�ects a gradual shift in the morphology of Irish nouns, whose morphological representation (unlike that of possessive particles, for instance) can lack the ability to trigger lenition. The latter is understood as a property of words as morphological (not syntactic) objects, like having an in�ectional ending or a pre�x, or a word-closing a�x. As a result, the morphology of gender on N is di�erent from that on D, although the two share the same �� feature values. But such an asymmetry is not surprising. In realizing the same set of in�ectional features, determiners often de�ne morphological paradigms organized di�erently from those of lexical nouns (and adjectives). French is an illustration. Here, determiners oppose an invariable plural (les, ces /le/, /se/) to a gender-di�erentiated singular (la - le, ce-cette /la/ - /l@/, /s@/ - /sEt/ ). By contrast, adjectives, personal pronouns and those nouns that have a masculine and a feminine alternant either have no opposition (like joli, jolie, jolis, jolies, all /joli/), or they primarily oppose masculine and feminine, and only in some cases specify a number form inside a determinate gender value, like nouveaux /nuvo/, which can only be masculine and plural. This is shown in (��)-(��): (��) French determiners: primary number opposition, secondary gender opposition le, ce, mon - les, ces, mes ���� �� ��� �� ���� �� ��� �� l@, s@, mõ la, sEt, ma le, se, me (��) French nouns/adjectives: primary gender opposition, secondary number opposition plein, écrit, il/elle - plein<z>, écrit<z>, il<z>/elle<z> ���� �� ���� �� plœ̃, ekKi, il ��� �� ��� �� plEn, ekKit, El (��) principal, nouvel - principaux, nouveaux ���� �� ��� �� ���� �� ��� �� pKẼsipo, nuvo pKẼsipal, nuvEl This familiar example shows that there is nothing unusual in having morphology organize di�erently across D and N the syntactic featural information shared between the two. But the di�erence is not to be construed as if the non-morphological information were automatically semantic in nature. The Irish facts, especially with the constant feminine gender of male-denoting nouns like piteog (see �.�), clearly show that what lies behind the weakening of gender morphology on nouns is not a reduction to semantic-based assignment. This is relevant to current debates about gender in natural language, which distinguish between an interpretable and a purely morphological value for this category. A more nuanced approach would distinguish the mechanisms for gender assignment, which may be based more on the form or on the content of a linguistic representation, from the properties of the representation itself. Within these properties, gender has a syntactic and a morphological facet. The instability of Irish nominal gender, I have argued, concern the latter. �� R��������� Acquaviva, Paolo. ����. The structure of the Italian declension system. In Fabio. Montermini, Gilles Boyé, and Jesse Tseng (eds.), �th Décembrettes: Morphology in Bordeaux. ��–��. 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