by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed

We are happy to announce a talk by Edgar Onea (Graz) in the Semantics Colloquium.

The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.
If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link. 

Date: June 11, 2026

Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.

Title: A Static Semantics for Gender and Anaphora

Abstract:
This talk develops a compositional semantics in which the basic nominal objects manipulated by grammar are not individuals, but loci: formal representational addresses under which individuals are stored. The central motivation comes from grammatical gender. Unlike person or number, grammatical gender does not normally contribute an ordinary individual-level property: a German masculine pronoun, for instance, need not refer to a male individual. Yet gender  constrains cross-sentential anaphora. The question is therefore how a feature can matter for interpretation without being a truth-conditional property of the individual.

I propose that grammatical gender is a property of representations rather than of individuals. A locus can represent an individual while also carrying a grammatical class such as masculine, feminine, or neuter. Pronouns  are then interpreted as targeting loci, not directly individuals. This makes it possible to model gender-sensitive anaphora compositionally without treating pronouns as covert definite descriptions and without adding grammatical gender to the ontology of individuals.
 
The framework also extends to donkey dependencies. Indexed indefinites impose witness conditions on loci, while complex loci encode representational dependencies. This yields effects usually associated with dynamic semantics, including cross-sentential anaphora and weak/strong donkey readings, but within a static compositional system.