Gender “Polarity”: Theoretical Aspects of Somali Nominal Morphology

The concept of polarity (Meinhof 1912) stands for a widely recognized principle said to be operative in the Afroasiatic languages, the core case being the polarity patterns of gender reversals in Cushitic. As is quite well-known, only internal plurals seem to keep the same gender as the base singular form in Somali: diin (m) ‘tortoise’ / diin-a-n (m) ‘tortoises’ (see section 3.2.2). Other plurals, whether prosodic plurals (arday ‘student’ (m) / arday ‘students’ (f)) or plurals derived by suffixation (inan (m) ‘boy’ / inam-(m)o (f) ‘boys,’ gabadh (f) ‘girl’ / gabdh-o (m) ‘girls,’ hooyo (f) ‘mother’ / hooyo-oyin (m) ‘mothers,’ etc.), seem systematically “polaric.” However, both empirical (including historical) and theoretical considerations suggest that the concept of polarity, as a principle of grammar, is hardly plausible, and that a more articulate account is required. In this paper, I explore the possibility of deriving the observed polarity effects from a more abstract property of nominal number in Somali, namely the fact that plural affixes are nominal categories which behave like other nominal affixes with a fixed inherent gender. The account will rest on a derivational view of plural formation, leading to an unified treatment of these forms which explains many of their syntactic and morphological peculiarities, such as the