Titre : Animacy, gender, and number in the noun phrase
Conférencier : Samuel Jambrović, boursier postdoctoral, Université McGill 

Résumé : The nouns femme and maison are both feminine in French, yet only femme presupposes femaleness. Analogously, the nouns organes and viscères are both plural in form, yet only organes is countable. To account for these differences, many authors resort to a system of gender and number features where each value comes in two guises: one that is "interpretable", or legible at logical form, and another that is "uninterpretable", or illegible at logical form (Matushansky 2013; Kramer 2014, 2015; Anagnostopoulou 2017; Smith 2017; Wurmbrand 2017a,b; Panagiotidis 2019; Shen & Smith 2019; Smith 2021; Steriopolo 2024; Adamson & Anagnostopoulou 2024; Adamson 2025). In this approach, femme would have an interpretable feminine feature, or [iF], on the nominalizer n, and maison would have an uninterpretable feminine feature, or [uF], on n. 

Based on the phenomenon of differential object marking in Spanish, I defend Panagiotidis's (2019) claim that the extended nominal projection contains a dedicated animacy phrase (AnimP) and argue that gender features only have consequences for interpretation when they are hosted by Anim. Accordingly, I represent femme as an AnimP with an [F] feature on Anim and maison as an nP with an [F] feature on n. Not only does this view obviate the need for interpretable and uninterpretable versions of the same feature, but it also captures animate feminine nouns like personne 'person', which does not presuppose femaleness, by positioning its [F] feature on n rather than Anim. As for number features, I propose that they make a semantic contribution on Div (Num) but not on n. For example, organes is a DivP with a [PL] feature on Div, and viscères is a DivP with a [PL] feature on n. 

In short, gender and number features only factor into the denotation of a noun when they are introduced by the projections where they "belong": AnimP and DivP, respectively. When the locus of these features is n instead of Anim or Div, they participate in syntactic operations like concord and agreement but have no bearing on interpretation.