(Grammatical) gender troubles and the gender of pronouns

Abstract

Chapter 9 argues that grammatical gender is hosted on the nominalizing head, whereas semantic gender is hosted in a higher head, one that is also responsible for animacy. The claim is not new but here it is supported by looking at two classes of evidence from the behaviour of empty nouns in strong pronouns and pronominal clitics and from a phenomenon of ‘transgendering’ in Brazilian Portuguese and Modern Greek. It is argued that pronominal clitics are not necessarily animate exactly because they lack the structural layer where semantic gender is encoded and that if the semantic gender layer is coerced to take an nP as a complement, the resulting referent will always be animate.