Number-driven gender syncretism and Impoverishment: Some insights from Kannada

This paper discusses how gender and number systems interact, focusing on morphological syncretisms of gender exponence in non-singular numbers. Working within the framework of Distributed Morphology, and using data from Kannada, which expresses three gender distinctions in the singular but only two in the plural, I first investigate previous analyses of gender-number syncretism. Then, I propose a refined featural specification of gender, discussing why it is necessary to capture the syncretisms present in Kannada. This refined specification is a multidimensional approach to grammatical gender, encoding gender as a set of multiple features within a feature-geometrical hierarchy