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