Gender and Number in Romance

Abstract

This article assesses the relation between formal gender and grammatical number. It is claimed that both gender and number are the ex- ponents of interpretable features in functional projections of nominals. It is also shown that number can only be expressed in categories that are assigned a formal gender or class. A strong version of the Uniformity hypothesis is adopted by suggesting that nominal constructions not only should conform to a universal hierarchical structure but the locus where their grammatical features are interpreted should be invariant.