Nominal Ellipsis and the Interpretation of Gender in Greek

Abstract

Merchant (2014) observes that Greek has three classes of masculine-feminine noun pairs that differ in whether nominal ellipsis with gender mismatches is possible . We put forward an account of this observation, building on the idea that while certain gendered nouns have their gender inferences as part of their lexical semantics, others are underspecified and only obtain a gender inference via competition with the opposite gender. We claim that the behavior of the three classes of nouns under nominal ellipsis with gender mismatches falls out straightforwardly from their semantics under an auxiliary assumption that gender competition does not happen under nominal ellipsis.