Gender, number and inflectional class in Romance: Feminine/plural -a

We discuss the Romance nominal inflection -a, which surfaces both as a singular feminine exponent and as a lexicalization of “cohesive” plurals. The empirical focus is on Central Calabrian varieties, where -a plurals occur in the contexts of inflectional systems that do not differentiate masculine and feminine in the plural, as well as on Sursilvan Romansh varieties, where -a productively forms feminine singulars with an interpretation akin to that of -a plurals in Italian. On the basis of our case studies, we characterize the inflectional morphology in nouns as (sometimes) endowed with semantic content, specifically with the Class properties [aggregate] for mass and [] for plural.