A Study of Gender Agreement in Abyānaʾī Dialect

Gender as a nominal inflectional category is found in some modern Iranian languages, although they differ in the way this concept is realized. Abyānaʾī, belonging to the Central Dialects of Iran, does not have a grammatical way of marking the gender. In other words, there are no individual formal markers (except for some nouns ending in vowels) distinguishing between the two genders. In order to determine the status of gender in this dialect, based on Corbettʼs (1991) theoretical framework, agreement was taken as the criterion for distinguishing masculine and feminine genders. By instantiating dialect materials collected by fieldwork and through interviews with four informants, the present article seeks to determine the scope of gender agreement, namely the elements showing agreement in gender with their head noun. This study showed that Abyānaʾī has an agreement on both the noun phrase and clause levels. The grammatical gender of the head noun determined the morphological form of some of its dependents, such as the numeral "one", attributive adjectives, demonstratives, predicative adjectives ending in /-ɑ/, ordinal numbers, definite article, comparative adjectives, and the quantifier "more". On the clause level, on the other hand, only the third person singular form of past verbs agreed in gender either with the subject (as in the case of intransitive), or with the object (as in the case of transitive). Because the gender distinctions appeared in the singular but not in the plural, the gender system of Abyānaʾī should be considered as a convergent type.