The representation of gender on local personal pronouns

Abstract

Based on a typological study of 62 languages that show gender distinctions on local-person pronouns, this paper identifies certain person- and number-based restrictions on the expression of gender with local person. In order to derive these restrictions, it is argued that ϕ-features involve hierarchical structures, both in their internal representation and in their syntactic location. Their internal structure can be represented in feature-geometric terms, whereas their syntactic location in the pronominal extended projection is such that person is encoded as the lowest, and gender as the highest feature. This is argued to account for the empirical generalisations on feature co-occurrence restrictions, and pronouns’ morphological realisation.