Gender and headedness in nominal compounds in Somali

This paper examines how gender is assigned to compounds in Somali, and how this relates to the notion of headedness. When two Somali noun roots of different genders are compounded, various types of mismatches in gender cues are found: subject-verb agreement is consistently predictable from the gender of the initial member of the compound (the semantic head), suggesting that this is the member which determines compound gender. In contrast, the definite article, which is phonologically bound to the final member, shows variable gender agreement: it is either in line with the compound gender or the gender of the final member. Somali furthermore exhibits a correlation between the gender of nouns and their tone pattern. In noun-noun root compounds, it is the final member which determines the tone pattern. If the gender of this member is different from the initial member, the result is thus a mismatch between compound gender on the one hand, and the tone pattern of the compound on the other. I propose that the attested variation in definite article assignment is the result of choosing either a mismatch between definite article and tone pattern on the one hand, and on the other, a mismatch in agreement cues on the article and the verb.