Kučerová (2018) puts forward a novel theory of the morphology and interpretation of nominal gender in Italian. Here, we take issue with this theory from both empirical and theoretical standpoints. We first show that several generalizations presented as empirical support for it are incorrect. We then point out three fundamental theoretical challenges. First, the proposed three-way classification of nouns does not represent the full range of facts, because it does not take into account plural morphology or the interdependencies of class and gender features. Second, the account of gender mismatch in terms of “semicon-servativity” fails to capture the Italian data, once the full paradigm is considered. Finally, the use of phase theory to model contextual valuation of gender faces an insurmountable lookahead problem.

We present novel data showing that indexicals, first and second person pronouns in particular, occurring in a certain kind of attitude report in Uyghur are interpreted with respect to the reported context (indexical shifting). While previous authors report similar shifted interpretations of indexicals in languages such as Amharic and Zazaki, we observe a unique feature of Uyghur indexical shifting: it is sensitive to structural positions of the indexical item, and as a consequence can be partial. We account for the structural sensitivity of Uyghur indexical shifting with a context-shifting operator (or monster ) that is syntactically independent from the embedding attitude predicate.