Different number, different gender: Comparing Romanian and Guébie

Many languages contain nouns that seem to have different genders in the singular and in the plural. In this paper, we investigate two languages with this kind of “ambigeneric” noun: Romanian (Romance; Romania) and Guébie (Kru; Côte d’Ivoire). Romanian is well-known for its ambigeneric nouns, traditionally referred to as neuter, but ambigeneric nouns in Guébie have not been previously studied. While Guébie is unrelated to Romanian, and its gender system is based on different features, the ambigeneric nouns in the two languages are strikingly similar. Building on the analysis of Romanian in Kramer 2015ab, we argue for a unified Distributed Morphology analysis of ambigeneric nouns in Romanian and Guébie. Specifically, we claim that (i) ambigeneric nouns lack gender features, and (ii) the ambigeneric pattern is generated through a handful of Impoverishment operations. We show how alternative approaches to ambigeneric nouns face empirical and conceptual challenges in accounting for Romanian and Guébie. Overall, the analysis supports the cross-linguistic approach to gender features developed in Kramer 2015a, where “neuter” nouns lack gender features, and it provides evidence in favor of a Distributed Morphology approach to ambigeneric nouns in general.