Mixed Gender Agreement in Russian DPs

Abstract

This thesis provides a new account of mixed gender agreement in Russian, incorporating the joint strengths of several previous accounts. Mixed agreement results when some elements in a sentence agree with the grammatical gender of a hybrid noun, while other elements agree with the semantic gender of the referent. In the present proposal, grammatical gender is a feature on N, and agreement with grammatical gender propagates up from N. D is the locus of reference and introduces the referent-derived φ-features. Via feature sharing, features on D can value not only elements further up in the derivation, as in previous proposals, but also elements downward in the DP, allowing DP-internal modifiers to display semantic agreement. A null blocking morpheme Б prevents feature sharing between the two agreement domains.