Gender at the edge

This article develops an analysis of Gender whereby D-gender enters
grammar as a feature variable (edge linker), without a fixed value,
either probing n or scanning the context for a value. Only the latter
strategy is available in pronominal gender languages such as English,
as they lack n-gender, whereas both strategies are applicable in ngender
languages, variably so for variable DPs, depending on their nP
content and on context. The article adopts the idea that context linking
does not merely involve pragmatic context scanning but also has a
syntactic side to it, edge computation, whereby context-scanned and
recycled features are computed at the phase edge in relation to CPinternal
elements, via edge linkers. The context-linking approach has
been previously launched for Tense and Person. This article extends
it to Gender, thereby generalizing over context-sensitive grammatical
categories and developing a novel view of the overall architecture of
grammar.