Pascual Masullo (Pittsburgh) and Marcela Depiante

GLOW 27, Thessaloniki April 18–21, 2004
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Gender is in the Lexicon, Number is in the Syntax:
Evidence from Nominal Ellipsis in Spanish
Pascual José Masullo, University of Pittsburgh, pascual@pitt.edu
Marcela Depiante, Universidad del Comahue (Argentina), depiantem@yahoo.com
It has been traditionally assumed that while gender is a lexical feature, number inflection is
determined post-lexically. This paper claims that the behavior of nominal ellipsis in Spanish
confirms this traditional view. As (1) below shows, while a mismatch in number is allowed
between antecedent and elided element, ellipsis requires a match in gender features (a
phenomenon noted by Brucart 1999, among others):
(1) a. Juan visitó a sus tíos y Pedro visitó al tío suyo.
John visited his uncles and Peter visited the (MASC-SING) his.
“John visited his uncles and Peter visited his uncle.”
b. * Juan visitó a su tío y Pedro visitó a la tía suya.
John visited his uncle and Peter visited the (FEM-SING) his.
“John visited his uncle and Peter visited his aunt”.
This is reminiscent of the different behavior of main and auxiliary verbs with respect to
ellipsis, noted by Lasnik (1995):
(2) a. John slept soundly and Mary will sleep too.
b. *John was here and Mary will be too.
c. ?? John was sleeping soundly and Mary will be sleeping too.
To account for the contrast in (2), Lasnik abandons Chomsky’s (1993, 1995)
assumption that all elements enter the computational system fully inflected, and proposes a
mixed system instead: while auxiliary verbs are already inflected in the numeration, main
verbs enter the syntactic component without any inflectional markings. If this is so, Lasnik
argues, at some point in the derivation we will have the representation (3) for (2a), in which
the required identity between antecedent and elided element (viz. sleep) is guaranteed:
(3) John T PRET sleep soundly and Mary will sleep too.
We will assume that ellipsis consists in a deletion process at PF under formal identity
(Chomsky & Lasnik 1993, Sag 1976, among others), and that the elided element in (1) above
is the actual head noun and not a higher projection, as in the case of NP-ellipsis in English
(Contreras 1989). If, moreover, we (partially) extend Lasnik’s mixed system to the nominal
domain, we can account for the contrast in (1): Just like main verbs and T, N and Number
enter the computational system separately. This will ensure the required identity for ellipsis in
the case of (1a) prior to the overt movement of N to Number, as is shown in (4a). In contrast,
if gender is an intrinsic feature of the noun, so that at no point in the derivation is the noun
stem detached from its gender feature, we can’t obtain identity between the nouns involved in
the case of (1b), and so ellipsis is not licensed, as is shown in (4b).
(4) a. Juan visitó a su Num PL tío MASC y Pedro visitó al Num SG tío MASC suyo.
b. * Juan visitó a su tío MASC y Pedro visitó a la tía FEM suya.
Although number in Spanish is generally a variable feature (syntactically acquired, as
we have seen), it can sometimes be intrinsic. Thus, some nouns are always plural, regardless

Main Session Abstracts
of meaning (albricias “good tidings”, bodas “wedding”, noticias “news”, etc.). Our analysis
therefore predicts that this kind of noun will not be able to license ellipsis of a singular but
otherwise identical noun (in the few cases where this is possible). The unacceptability of (5)
below bears out our prediction, lending further support to the analysis we have proposed:
(5) ?? Las noticias de la televisión y la noticia de la radio no coinciden.
The news of the TV and the news of the radio do not agree.
“The news on the TV and those on the radio do not agree”.
While nominal ellipsis prohibits a gender mismatch, ellipsis of nominal modifiers
(quantifiers, adjectives, etc.) does not require gender identity (6), which might be taken as a
serious counterexample to the proposal that gender is lexically determined:
(6) El niño es bueno y la niña es buena también.
The boy is good-MASC and the girl is good-FEM too.
However, if we recall that the gender markings on adjectives and determiners in Romance
result from agreement with the noun they modify, our proposal is reinforced, since these must
necessarily enter the computational system without any gender specification. Thus, before
noun modifiers acquire their gender (the mechanism whereby they do so is irrelevant for our
purposes), the formal identity required for ellipsis is obtained:
(7) El niño MASC es buen- y la niña FEM es buen- también.
The following example of a related phenomenon in English (one-substitution) might
also be construed as a counterexample:
(8) I have a neighbor who once played third base for the White Sox, and I have one who was Miss
Georgia of 1976 (McCawley 1998, p. 371).
This apparent problem can be solved, however, once we realize that nouns like neighbor are
not ambiguous with respect to gender, but rather referentially vague, i.e. the natural gender
(or sex) of the referent must be pragmatically determined. There is no actual gender feature
associated with this kind of noun, and so the formal identity required (in this case, for onesubstitution)
is once again ensured.
Finally, in light of the data examined, we will briefly consider the controversy over
the need to postulate both Number and Gender projections within DP (as in Picallo 1991,
Bernstein 1991), or only a Number projection (as in Ritter 1991).
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