In Italian, GG plays an important role at the syntactic level as it triggers agreement both within and outside the DP. Gender agreement affects different elements: definite and indefinite determiners, pronouns (both personal pronouns and object clitics), adjectives in a modifier position (3) or as predicates; also (some) quantifiers are marked for gender (4). At the syntactic level, Italian has gender agreement on past participles with the auxiliary essere ('be') and on past participles with the auxiliary avere ('have') when the object is realized as a clitic pronoun (5). In the former case (with essere), participles agree in gender and number with the grammatical subject in the sentence; in the latter (with avere), agreement is triggered by the presence of an object clitic, thus the participle agrees with the object, rather than with the subject in the clause.
(3) La nuova casa the.F new.F house.F
67 (4) Molte case
Many.F.Pl houses.F.Pl
(5) La casa l’ho affittata subito
The.F house.F clit.F rented.F immediately
Moreover, Longobardi (1994) claimed first that bare nouns are not licit arguments in the syntax of Italian language. This means that every time a noun is retrieved from the lexicon and is introduced in a syntactic derivation, a full DP is necessarily constructed. The assumption is very relevant here: the construction of a DP automatically calls into play GG as definite and indefinite articles are both marked for gender and number. In other words, for languages like Italian, in which bare arguments are not admitted in the derivation, access to grammatical gender information takes place automatically, any time a noun joins the syntactic derivation.
Friedmann and Biran (2003) capitalize on Longobardi (1994) and suggest that the lack of bare nouns in syntactic structures is a crucial factor, capable of determining important differences among languages with respect to GG retrieval. In particular, the authors suggest the idea that speakers of languages in which bare nouns are admitted in the syntactic derivation, e.g. Hebrew, activate the information about GG only if this is requested by the syntactic context in which the noun is inserted, otherwise GG remains silent and non-active. In contrast, languages of the Italian type always require the activation of information about GG, as any time a noun is retrieved from the lexicon, a full DP is constructed, independently of the contingent syntactic conditions. According to Friedmann and Biran (2003), constraints on the use of bare nouns are able to shape speakers performance even in single word tasks: speakers of Hebrew, for example, show signs of gender preservation neither in cases of paraphasias nor in tip-of-the-tongue states24 (TOT). In contrast, speakers of Italian show clear signs of correct gender activation despite paraphasias and TOTs (Caramazza and Miozzo, 1997; Vigliocco et al., 1997). Friedmann and Biran (2003) explain the different behaviours across languages as a by-product of differences concerning bare nouns: speakers of languages in which bare
24 The Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon is a state in which the speaker fails at successfully retrieving the desired word and has access only to partial information; he or she also has a feeling of imminent activation.
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nouns are not allowed (i.e. Italian) overuse DPs, which means that they always automatically retrieve gender, even in single word tasks (e.g. picture naming tasks).
Moreover, gender retrieval is such a core characteristics of lexicon processing in Italian, that it takes place even despite incomplete activation of words. In contrast, no gender retrieval is entailed in single word tasks for speakers who admit bare nouns in their language (e.g. Hebrew). In the view of Friedmann and Biran (2003), automaticity of gender retrieval can therefore be considered as a language specific phenomenon, constrained by syntactic factors: syntax plays a crucial role in shaping the cognitive and linguistic process of lexical retrieval, distinguishing between languages that automatically perform gender retrieval whenever a noun is selected and others that do not. According to Friedmann and Biran (2003), Italian belongs to the former group.
This view is only partially supported by Paganelli at al. (2003): their unimpaired speakers of Italian show gender congruency effects in picture naming only if the task explicitly requests participants to name objects by providing a full DP. In contrast, in the condition in which experimenters request participants to name objects by speaking aloud only bare nouns, no such effect can be detected, in the sense that the non-target words provided by participants very often have a different gender with respect to the target word.
In other words, on the one hand Paganelli et al. (2003) find convergent evidence of the crucial difference played by DPs versus bare nouns with respect to gender retrieval: the former requires automatic activation of GG, the latter does not. On the other hand, their results speak against the hypothesis of language specific effects: the performance of unimpaired speakers of Italian is characterized both by gender congruence and incongruence, depending on the experimental conditions in use (DPs vs. bare nouns).
Syntax plays a role then, but only with respect to the specific conditions and not as a language specific phenomenon. The typological difference pointed out by Friedmann and Biran (2003) between languages that admit bare nouns and others that do not is therefore questioned, while the relevance of DP construction for GG retrieval is further supported.
When dealing with grammatical gender in syntax, it is necessary to address the issue concerning the presence of a functional projection specifically dedicated to the realization of grammatical gender. Bernstein (1993) proposed that languages that have overt morphological markers for gender according to different inflectional classes, also dispose of a dedicated functional projection in the DP. According to the author, the presence of a
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GenderP is parametrized. In the author’s view, languages that set a positive value, do not only manifest overt gender markers, but also admit syntactic phenomena like noun ellipsis and require head noun movement towards a higher position in the DP functional domain (resulting in the Noun/Adjective order, rather than in the Adjective/Noun one).
Similarly, Picallo (1991, 2008) posits that GG is a functional element represented by a feature [CLASS] in a dedicated functional projection, the same in use for the realization of noun classifiers in Mayan languages and for noun class markers in languages of the Bantu type. Picallo (1991) also assumes that the noun morphology of Romance languages like Spanish and Catalan mirror the cyclic upwards movement of the noun. Given a word like the Spanish muchachas ('girls.F.PL.'), the gender marker -a linearly precedes the plural number marker -s, which means that NumP should occupy a functional projection higher than the one dedicated to gender (GenP or WordMarkerP in Bernstein (1993), classP in Picallo (2008)).
There is no agreement on the presence of a dedicated functional projection for gender in the DP (Alexiadou, 2004; Alexiadou, Haegemann, Stavrou, 2007; Carstens, 2000; Di Domenico, 1997). Alexiadou (2004) rejected Bernstein’s (1993) generalization by showing that the correlation between presence of gender markers, noun movement and noun ellipsis (correlation that Bernstein takes as a manifestation of gender projection in the DP) does not hold when more languages are observed and compared (e.g., Italian, Spanish, Greek and Hebrew in her work). In Alexiadou´s (2004 and Alexiadou et al.
2007) view, (most)25 names enter the derivation with their inherent gender feature, which is stored in the lexicon as part of the lexical nodes, contrary to number, which is always syntactically assigned. For what concerns the structure of the DP, number and gender then clearly differ: the former is a syntactically active feature, which dispose of a functional projection within the DP, the latter is represented on the NumP and is therefore parasitic to the structure (De Vincenzi and Di Domenico, 1999; Di Domenico, 1997).
Finally, an operation of feature coping and sharing realizes concord of the head noun with its modifiers and the determiner (Alexiadou et al. 2007, Carstens, 2000; Giusti, 2009).
I will not go further into the detailed reasons for rejecting the hypothesis of a functional head dedicated to gender feature projection, what really matters to the present
25 Alexiadou (2004) distinguishes between nouns endowed with an intrinsic gender feature and nouns that get their gender feature assigned at the syntactic level. The difference will be brought up in the discussion in the next paragraphs.
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work is the relevance of gender in the syntactic derivation and at PF (Alexiadou, 2004).
The studies reviewed above all agree on the presence of GG in syntax and the necessity for its retrieval whenever a noun enters a syntactic computation (at least in Italian). This suggests that the mapping between grammatical gender and its overt realization through morphological markers on determiners, modifiers and any other element sharing the feature with the noun should be quite robust in languages like Italian, and therefore GG should play a relevant role in language processing. The hypothesis is founded on Longobardi (1994) and is further supported by Friedmann and Biran (2003).
In the next section, I will present some major information on lexical (and therefore gender) retrieval. Background information will be indeed particularly useful for the evaluation of how PADs retrieve GG in comparison to unimpaired speakers.