The gender system of Coastal Marind

The gender system of Coastal Marind (a Papuan language of the Anim family of
South New Guinea; Usher & Suter 2015) is treated in relative detail in Drabbe’s
(1955) masterful grammar. The division of nouns into four genders (basically mas-
culine, feminine and two inanimate genders) is familiar from various languages
around the globe, but the morphology of exponence (gender agreement marked
to a large extent by stem-internal changes on targets) is somewhat more exotic
and is occasionally cited in the literature. In this paper I provide an overview of
the system, combined with discussion of two issues: the origins of stem-internal
gender agreement, and the wide-ranging syncretism between animate plurals and
the 4th gender (the 2nd inanimate gender). I show that this ‘syncretism’ makes the
status of the 4th gender ambiguous, since the members of this gender also could
be analysed as an unusually large class of pluralia tantum. While I argue that the
synchronic 4-gender analysis must be maintained for Coastal Marind, I speculate
that an erstwhile grouping of pluralia tantum provided the diachronic source of
the 4th gender.