Rappresentazione categoriale ed esponenza: il caso delle definizioni sintagmatiche della categoria di genere

The representation of gender raises interesting problems that concern the multiple manifestations of the category at the semantic, morphological and syntactic level. The main focus of this paper is a criticism of the definition of gender in terms of agreement. It is argued that agreement is only an exponent of the category and as such it pertains to the empirical and descriptive level of representation. The category of gender in itself requires a more abstract representation. It primarily concerns paradigmatic morpho-semantic properties, whose relationship to the various manifestation properties of exponence is not easy to be determined. These problems are also debated by reconsidering some of the prominent perspectives on gender in the history of linguistics.