Gender Resolution in Coordination and Disjunction

Grammatical gender resolution has been formally modeled as set union in Lexical Functional Grammar (Dalrymple and Kaplan 2000), with gender values represented as sets, and the gender value of a coordinate structure defined as the union of the gender value of the conjuncts. However, this approach does not extend well to languages like Norwegian, where some determiners, adjectives, and nouns have underspecified gender (Dyvik 2006). Following Dyvik (2006), we propose that the gender feature is best represented not as a set, but as a feature structure, with positively and negatively specified values for features like MASC, FEM, and NEUT (corresponding to the markers in the set-based approach of Dalrymple and Kaplan). This allows a treatment of gender underspecification which meshes well with the feature-structure-based treatment of indeterminacy presented by Dalrymple, King, and Sadler (2006). We also explore contrasts between gender resolution in coordination and gender agreement in disjunction. In coordination, the uniformly positively-specified gender features of the conjuncts are passed up to determine the gender of the coordinate structure, and gender agreement is with the resolved gender feature; in disjunction, the gender features of the agreement target must be compatible with every member of the disjunction.