Many three-gendered languages have in common that some nouns are assigned conceptual gender—where the value of gender correlates with the interpretation of the noun—while other nouns are assigned arbitrary gender—where there is no such correlation. Strikingly, however, such languages do not always pattern together in how they resolve agreement with gender-mismatched coordinated nominals. If coordination resolution reflects feature representation, variation across languages with similar gender categories presents a puzzle. We hypothesize that resolution with gender-mismatched human and inanimate coordinated nominals is predictable from how properties like animacy and individuation are encoded within a language’s gender system. Focusing on Greek and contrasting patterns in Icelandic and Bosnian/ Croatian/Serbian, we capture resolved agreement patterns through (a) an interpretable vs. uninterpretable feature distinction, (b) a featuregeometric account as in Harley and Ritter 2002, and (c) universal coordination resolution mechanisms we refer to as percolation and conversion . Our system correlates resolution with other language-internal properties for gender agreement across the languages we investigate and captures complex patterns of resolution that have not been fully appreciated.

The article establishes a novel generalization concerning the placement of arguments by Spell-Out. It centers on the principles that force arguments to leave the VP across languages. The empirical domain consists of constructions where subject movement is not required for reasons that have to do with the Extended Projection Principle. In these environments and whenever a sentence contains both a subject and a direct object, one of the arguments must vacate the VP. We argue that argument externalization is related to Case. It is forced because movement of both arguments to a single head T 0 that contains two active Case features in the covert component is banned.

Reinhart and Reuland (1993) propose the following typology of anaphoric expressions: SELF anaphors (+SELF, −R), SE anaphors (−SELF, −R), and pronouns (−SELF, +R). We argue that the Greek anaphor o eaftos tu ‘the self his’ exemplifies a fourth type, predicted by Reinhart and Reuland's typology but not instantiated in their system: an “inalienable possession” anaphor (+SELF, +R). Within Reinhart and Reuland's framework such anaphors are allowed provided that (a) they do not enter into chain formation and (b) they satisfy the (reflexivity) binding conditions through abstract incorporation of the nominal head into the predicate they reflexivize. The proposed analysis makes valid predictions concerning the distribution of Greek anaphors as opposed to English/Dutch anaphors.