We don’t agree because we can’t agree.

These languages have no gender, so it makes no sense to even speak of gender agreement. DPs have nothing to agree with (other than number): I bought this/these yesterday. They are spread across the larger family: English, Afrikaans, Armenian, Kurmanji, Persian, Pashto, Bengali, Nepali.

Afrikaans
Ek het hierdie gister gekoop. [ I have this/these yesterday bought] (Afrikaans doesn’t even distinguish number!)

Armenian
Yes sa gnetsi yerekh. [I this bought yesterday] Yes srankʿ gnetsi yerekh. [I these bought yesterday]   

Persian
man diruz in rā xaridam [I yesterday this ACC bought] man diruz in-hā rā xaridam [I yesterday these ACC bought]

Bengali
āmi eṭa gotokal kinechi [I this yesterday bought] ēgulo āmi gotokāl kinechi. [these I yesterday bought]

We agree sometimes.

1. Many of the Germanic languages have merged masculine and feminine gender into one ‘common’ (com) gender. They have also adopted a single agreement pattern: DPs agree in gender in the singular but not in the plural. This family is unique in handling agreement with DPs this way. English, Afrikaans (see above) and Icelandic (see below) have gone their own ways.
2. Albanian reflects gender agreement everywhere in the singular except in the accusative. (In the plural agreement occurs ONLY in the nominative and accusative!!)
3. DPs in the Slavic languages must agree in the singular but the DPs in the plural have fallen together. It’s like ‘It’s too much trouble to keep separate DPs in the plural.’

We agree if we have to.

Like many other mIE languages, the Romance languages very often make use of a ‘neutral’ demonstrative pronoun that pays no attention to the gender of the referent. (This is the subject of the next post.) However, when speakers want to be emphatic about pointing out an object or constrast one object from another they resort to good old-fashioned proximal (near) and distal (far) demonstrative pronouns as can be seen in equivalents for I bought this (one, not that one) yesterday.

We fully agree.

The Baltic and Greek languages harbor no nonsense when it comes to agreement. Agreement is de rigeur with all genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) and numbers.

We find a way to agree.

From two geographical extremes of where the mIE languages are spoken we find the Celtic languages and three of the Indo-Aryan languages handling the question of DP gender agreement in very curious ways.
1. The Celtic languages require a 3rd person pronoun (‘he, she, it, they’) to accompany demonstrative pronoun. These personal pronouns carry the gender marking in the singular. The plural iad ‘they’ is good for all genders.
2. Since these sentences have ergative structure in Punjabi, Gujurati, and Hindi, the verb agrees in gender with the direct object, not the

A Multibhashi app user asked, “Hi friends, is this Hindi dialogue well written with correct grammar and correct translations? It says “yeh Meri dost hai” translates to “She is my friend” but I thought that “yeh” meant “this” or “that” not ”she”. A Reddit response was, “The sentences are grammatical. Hindi does not have 3rd person pronouns (he/she/it) and instead uses the words for this and that (demonstrative pronouns).”¹

New Jersey Italian Vernacular suggests Che fa questa_fem? [what does this] ‘What is this doing?’ for ‘What are you up to?’²

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/Hindi/comments/12op2m8/is_this_app_accurate/ ↩︎
2. https://modestyisforsuckers.com/2023/02/13/jersey-italian-slang/ ↩︎

*Agreement occurs between two words in a sentence or phrase. Some of the grammatical features of one word (usually a noun) are repeated in another word. For example, if a noun is plural then words modifying the noun will also have plural inflection, thus making obvious which noun is being modified, even if the noun isn’t nearby. Verbs also agree (suggesting at some level that verbs are modifiers also): Those_pl books_pl are_pl interesting. (In some languages even ‘interesting’ in that sentence would be marked plural.) Sometimes the agreement is obvious in the repetition of endings, as Russian kniga byla ‘a book was’.

Ergative structures are conceptually similar to passive structures in English such as The book was read by me. except that instead of a prepositional phrase agent (by me) the subject is inflected in the ergative (oblique) case and the verb agrees with the direct object:
me_erg the book_masc read_masc.

Gender is a category assigned to nouns. It sometimes matches real world male, female or neuter objects and so the possible genders are masculine, feminine and neuter. In some Scandinavian languages masculine and feminine have merged into a ‘common’ gender. In most languages the gender of a noun is arbitrary. For example French table ‘table’ is feminine while Italian tavalo is masculine.

Modify refers to the process of when a word limits or expands (modifies) the meaning of another word, such as in an adjective+noun phrase: burnt toast. It’s not just any prototypical toast, it’s burnt toast.