form-class and gender

[Martha McGinnis]

Dear DM-listers,

Something has been troubling me recently about the nature of agreement
with nouns.  Traditionally there are two kinds of more or less arbitrary
classes into which a noun can fall: its "form class" and its "gender".
It's said that gender is relevant for agreement, but that agreement ignores
form class.  For example, Spanish nouns have form classes that determine
whether they end in -a, -o, etc, but these don't correlate perfectly
with gender.  So you get "el muchach-o es feo" (the boy is ugly),
with masculine agreement, but "la man-o es fea" (the hand is ugly), with
feminine agreement.

But it's not completely straightforward to say that form class doesn't
trigger agreement.  For one thing, the form class morphology itself
is in a sense "agreeing" with the lexical root, unless the root comes
with a separate "form class" feature which is spelled out by the form
class morphology.  For another thing, I believe that in some cases
other morphology on the noun is affected by its form class, e.g. case
affixes on nouns in Greek can vary with form class.

So potentially we have (at least) two arbitrary properties of the stem,
X and Y, which trigger agreement in different domains -- one perhaps very
locally, and one less locally, e.g. on adjectival predicates, determiners,
etc.   Now a question arises -- is this a principled difference, or do
we in fact find languages with three or four such properties, all triggering
different kinds of agreement, or agreement in different locality domains?

Suppose the difference _is_ principled.  How should it be captured?
Within a syntactic theory where Infl (or Agr, or N-features) plays a
syntactic role, we could suppose that potentially nonlocal "gender"
agreement is really syntactic agreement, i.e., the pronunciation of
agreement features that play a role in the syntax (e.g. attracting NPs,
and/or checking/assigning their Case features) -- while "form-class"
agreement is purely morphological, referring only to features that play
no role in the syntax.  However, I don't know of any convincing evidence
that agreement plays _any_ role in the syntax (by contrast with abstract
Case, for which I think there is some evidence).  Can anyone point
to evidence of that kind, or does anyone have another suggestion as
to how to deal with the split between form-class and gender in DM?

Martha McGinnis