Gender assignment in Bartangi: Animacy, (non-)specificity, collective plurality

The article explores gender assignment in Bartangi in relation to the grammatical expression of specificity and collective plurality. Based on fieldwork data, it demonstrates that the gender of a noun may depend on the specificity of the noun phrase (NP). I analyze this relationship as a case of cumulative exponence, whereby gender and specificity are expressed through shared markers, and propose rules governing gender assignment. I identify five semantic classes of nouns—“inanimate”, “lower animate”, “higher animate”, “masculine”, and “feminine”—that condition gender agreement. The influence of specificity varies across these classes according to their position on the animacy hierarchy. “Higher animate” nouns permit agreement in both feminine and masculine genders to specify the sex of the referent, while “masculine” and “feminine” nouns do not allow the expression of referential status through gender markers. In the case of “inanimate” and “lower animate” nouns, specificity is more closely intertwined with gender, although exhibiting certain constraints. “Inanimate” nouns cannot license agreement in feminine gender in non-specific uses, while “lower animates” prohibit agreement in masculine gender when used in specific NPs. The paper further discusses the interplay between the expression of non-specificity and collective plurality, arguing that these categories can be distinguished. Finally, the Bartangi system is compared to cases of “recategorization” and “manipulated gender assignment” in other languages. The study highlights the uniqueness of the Bartangi data and their significance for theoretical and typological linguistics.