An unexpected gender-agreement pattern in Icelandic

This paper examines gender agreement variation for Icelandic sports-team names using the Icelandic Gigaword Corpus. Feminine and masculine sports-team names, such as Keflavík and Fjölnir, respectively, allow two different agreement patterns: (a) the expected (feminine/masculine) gender agreement corresponding to the gender of the team name or (b) unexpected neuter agreement. Interestingly, our corpus results reveal that the vast majority of the examples show neuter agreement, i.e., 80% of the total number. It is unclear how to account for this unexpected gender-agreement pattern. We discuss a few possible explanatory factors.