Overt gender marking depending on syntactic context in Ripano

Abstract

Based on dedicated fieldwork, this chapter analyses the gender system of Ripano (Italo-Romance), showing that it displays overt gender marking, but only depending on syntactic context. While overt gender per se and the syntactic dependency of gender marking via agreement on targets have both been described for several languages, the Ripano system is unprecedented, and deserves thorough description: thus, the chapter presents the phonological, morphological, and morphosyntactic prerequisites as well as the syntactic conditions which constrain overt gender marking. It places this peculiarity of Ripano in perspective, describing the many other quite extraordinary properties of this dialect: not only does it mark—unusually for Indo-European—gender/number agreement on finite verbs, but also on several other agreement targets, including non-finite verb forms, complementizers, wh-words, and even nouns, which in certain syntactic constructions cumulate the usual inherent gender specification with highly unusual contextual gender marking, determined via agreement with the clause subject.