The Gender of Heteroclites ¹

Abstract

Few have asked what happens to gender when a noun is heteroclitic – when its inflection draws on more than one inflection class. While heteroclisis has moved from being treated as a marginal irregularity to a theoretically revealing phenomenon, its implications for gender assignment remain largely unexplored. A range of examples, with case studies from Latin, Slavonic, Celtic and Germanic, reveal that the ‘missing’ evidence on heteroclite gender is a window into the internal structure of lexemes. Heteroclites show how grammatical information is distributed across different levels of lexical representation. In many instances, gender is specified at the level of the lexeme, often due to semantic assignment or because the contributing inflection classes converge on the same gender. In other cases, however, gender tracks heteroclisis more closely, being determined at the level of sub‐paradigms – or, rarely, individual paradigm cells. Classic examples like Latin balneum ‘bath’ demonstrate that internal splits in inflection can be mirrored by splits in agreement, while more extreme cases reveal cell‐by‐cell gender alternation. By disentangling heteroclisis from related phenomena such as heterogeneity and overabundance, the paper argues that gender in heteroclites provides uniquely sharp evidence for how lexemes are specified, constrained, and accessed at the morphology–syntax interface.