The Teacher and the Frog: Unveiling the Morphosyntax of Gender Shifts in Czech with Nanosyntax

This study examines the formation of nouns in Czech that show grammatical gender through stem morphemes and three productive suffixes: -a, -k-(a), and -ák. These suffixes are the main morphological exponents across three noun classes – monomorphemic (e.g. kmotr/kmotr-a), bimorphemic (učitel/učitel-k-a), and stem–suffix compounds (žáb-a/žab-ák). Using nanosyntax, the study shows that gender alternations arise from hierarchical syntactic structures rather than lexical or semantic defaults. By investigating noun pairs such as učitel (‘teacher.Masc’) / učitel-k-a (‘teacher.Fem’) and žáb-a (‘frog.FEM’) / žab-ák (‘frog.MASC’), the study shows that masculine forms contain Class and Masc, while feminine forms emerge through the addition of Fem. Suffixes such as -k-a and -ák function as lexicalization solutions, structured through movement-based operations. This approach refines our understanding of Czech gender morphology, demonstrating that nanosyntax captures gender alternations systematically even when surface forms are unpredictable. By modeling these alternations within a unified syntactic framework, the study provides a principled account of morphological derivation and paves the way for further cross-linguistic extensions.