Tigrinya Gender Morphology and Agreement

Abstract

Tigrinya verbal and nominal morphology mark gender agreement according to a mixed system that may include natural gender, attributive gender, and grammatical gender. This paper will describe the distribution of natural and attributive gender features in empirical data, and speculate on the existence of grammatical gender. Morphological and syntactic models will be tested to house the necessary features in Tigrinya, and the existence of three covert noun classes will be proposed to account for the patterns of agreement.