Phi-features and the Modular Architecture of - UMR 7023 - CNRS

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The second point illustrated by the mismatches in Table 6.1 is that even the
purely grammatical gender/number detected by pronominal anaphora may mismatch
another grammatical gender seen by other linguistic phenomena like concord,
as for deća 'children' discussed above. Similarly, English committee-type
collectives in (370) may be singular or plural for agreement and local anaphora,
but require singular determiners for concord (Pollard and Sag 1994: 71, Wechsler
and Zlatić 2003: 4.3, Sauerland and Elbourne 2002). A case from French with its
richer concord morphology is laideron 'ugly woman' (373). It is masculine for DPinternal
concord, but feminine for floating quantifiers, predicate adjectives, secondary
predicates, and all pronominal anaphora (with some speaker variation; cf.
Morin 1978: 362, Larrivée 1994: 103, Kayne 2000: 181 note 35). 179
(372) ThisSG/*thesePL committee arePL (all/each) voting themselvesPL a raise.
(373) LesPL vieuxPLM laiderons ne pensent toutesPLF qu'à
The.PL old.PLM ugly.women think all.PLF only about
elles-mêmesPLF.
themselves.PLF.
(French; gender other than indicated is ungrammatical)
This is the heart of syntax-interpretation mismatches, if phi-matching in DPinternal
concord is syntax. However, the nature of concord remains ill-understood
(section 2.4). A clearer case is proposed in the next section.
6.3 French on
The French pronoun on presents a syntax-interpretation mismatch beyond concord,
affecting core syntactic phenomena, and beyond gender, in person and perhaps
number.
Table 6.2: French pronouns
arbitrary gender from interpretation if phi-matching in anaphora were extralinguistic, of the same
kind as the reference to linguistic properties in the last-mentioned trochaic foot ending on an epicene
feminine noun, but that seems implausible (cf. Lewis 1972: 195). Sauerland (2007) proposes
that arbitrary gender matching occurs through semantic identity conditions on the ellipsis
of the definite descriptions that give rise to pronouns. This intriguing proposal would remove arbitrary
gender from interpretation, provided the conditions work out. However, it seems not to allow
for mismatches with arbitrary gender that go to another arbitrary gender, as for Serbo-
Croatian braća 'brothers' in Table 6.1, nor the impossibility of using the semantic gender, as for
laideron in (373) or in Serbo-Croatian under the conditions discussed by Wechsler and Zlatić.
The relevant ellipsis might be made sensitive to morphological identity instead, but raising issues
for indirect licensing (Fiengo and May 1994, Fox 2000, Sauerland 2004, 2007). Wechsler and
Zlatić (1998) present evidence that arbitrary gender does matter in sloppy identity.
179 Kayne reduces the set of phenomena by giving floating quantifiers a silent pronoun in this
case.