Syntax circle: When mixed gender agreement fails: Locality and Cyclicity in Russian DPs

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Abstract

Russian exhibits a widely discussed phenomenon of mixed gender agreement, whereby a grammatically masculine noun referring to a female individual has both masculine and feminine modifiers. In this talk, I present previously undocumented restrictions on mixed agreement in Russian. I show that the availability of mixed agreement disappears when any of the following processes applies within the nominal domain: adjective scrambling, left branch extraction, split NP constructions, and ellipsis. I propose an analysis of these restrictions that relies on the existence of locality domains within the nominal phrase and on representing semantic gender as a functional projection within the DP. I further argue that the data support a syntactic, Agree-based approach to nominal concord.