This article presents a Minimalist syntactic analysis of sociopragmatically conditioned gender features on pronouns. To account for inter- and intra-speaker variation, I locate the parameter for social gender in the presence or absence of an unvalued gender feature on the phase head D. Supporting this analysis, I show that variation in English speakers’ acceptability and use of definite, specific singular they, as in (i), is sensitive to reference; this sensitivity is robustly explained by the location of gender features on D.

(i) Taylori is writing theiri own autobiography.

For speakers who report (i) as ungrammatical, a crash results from the uGender feature on D remaining unvalued. For innovative speakers, uGender is not present on D and no crash results from a lack of gender features. This analysis explains why a pragmatic feature like social gender can cause true syntactic ungrammaticality, since the narrow syntax encodes certain pragmatic features as obligatory.

The Munda languages of South Asia exhibit sound symbolism in their use of mimetic reduplication, to which they devote a surprisingly large percentage of their lexicons, typically upwards of ten percent. We present an extensive empirical typology of mimetic reduplication in seven Munda languages: Ho, Kera Mundari, Kharia, Mundari, Remo (Bondo), Santali, and Sora (Savara). Munda Mimetic forms can depict sensory qualities of sound, space, movement, texture, smell, taste, temperature, feelings, and sensations. The typology of mimetic reduplication in Munda varies across syntactic class, semantic domain and phonological form. This can shed light on the breadth of diverse structures in Munda languages, and may also be extrapolated to other languages and other examinations of reduplication and/or mimesis. This work provides a wealth of data to researchers of mimesis and reduplication, challenging the definition of what it means for forms to be sound-symbolic or reduplicated.

In this article, we explore whether hierarchy and linearity conspire to affect agreement. The data come from an experimental study of honorific agreement between verbal si and coordinate subjects in Korean. We focus on computing the mismatch driven by honorifically mixed conjuncts. Unlike South Slavic gender agreement, Korean has neither Resolved Agreement nor First Conjunct Agreement. Only Last Conjunct Agreement is attested in Korean honorification. We show that honorific agreement within coordinate subjects is triggered only when the honorific verbal si appears, which is substantially different from the case with the honorific nominal nim. We also show that acceptability significantly decreases when the last conjunct of coordinate subjects is incongruous with an honorific verb. We thus argue that verbal honorific agreement with Korean coordinate subjects is sensitive to linear order, mimicking South Slavic gender agreement.