Gender in Amharic: a morphosyntactic approach to natural and grammatical gender

• The gender system of Amharic (Ethiosemitic) relies heavily on natural gender.
• It is thus difficult for previous analyses to account for.
• I propose natural gender is an interpretable feature on the nominalizing head n.
• Arbitrary gender on inanimates is an uninterpretable version of the same feature.
• Additional evidence from gender and number interactions support the analysis.

Gender features can be divided into two types: natural gender (also called biological gender or sex) and grammatical gender (the arbitrary gender often associated with inanimates). Morphosyntactic analyses that address both aspects of gender are relatively rare, and they often play down or eliminate the role of natural gender in the morphosyntax. In this paper, I will argue for a new analysis of the relationship between grammatical gender and natural gender, using evidence from the language Amharic (Ethiosemitic). I show how conventional analyses of gender struggle with Amharic, and develop an alternative analysis that crucially relies on natural gender and grammatical gender both being features on n (cf. Lecarme, 2002 and Ferrari, 2005, inter alia; I assume lexical categories are decomposed into a category-defining head and a category-neutral root). Further evidence for the analysis is provided by the unusual interaction of gender and number in Amharic, as well as the morphosyntax of Amharic nominalizations. The paper concludes with some discussion of the diachrony of gender in Amharic and the cross-linguistic implications of the analysis.