Pascual Masullo (Pittsburgh) and Marcela Depiante

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).
45