Gender from Latin to Romance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michele Loporcaro
Keyword(s):  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Concurrent Systems ◽  
Fundamental Question ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Back Projection ◽  
Linguistic Typology ◽  
Romance Language ◽  
Dialect Variation ◽  
Main Culprit ◽  
Gender System

The book addresses grammatical gender in Romance, and its development from Latin. It works with the toolbox of current linguistic typology, and asks the fundamental question of how the Latin grammatical gender system gradually changed into those of the Romance languages. To answer this question, the book capitalizes on the pervasive dialect variation of which the better-known standard Romance languages only represent a fragment. Indeed, inspection of dialect variation across time and space forces one to dismiss the handbook account proclaiming that the neuter gender, contrasting with masculine and feminine in Latin, was eradicated from spoken Latin by late Empire times. Both Late Latin evidence and data from several modern dialects show that this never happened, and that the vulgate account proceeds from unwarranted back-projection of the data from modern languages like French and Italian. Rather, the neuter underwent transformations which are the main culprit for the differences in the gender system observed today between, say, Romanian, Sursilvan, Neapolitan, and Asturian, to cite just a few types of system which turn out to differ significantly. A precondition for establishing the database for diachronic investigation is a detailed description of many such systems, which reveals data whose interest transcends the diachronic issue under consideration: the book thus addresses systems where ‘husbands’ are feminine and others where ‘wives’ are masculine; discusses dialects where nouns overtly mark gender, but only in certain syntactic contexts; and proposes an analysis according to which one Romance language (Asturian) has split inherited grammatical gender into two concurrent systems.

Grammatical gender in Romance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michele Loporcaro
Keyword(s):  
Binary System ◽  
Binary Systems ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Sound Change ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Semantic Rule ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Dialect Variation ◽  
Gender System ◽  
Further Development

The most widespread type of gender system is exemplified with Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, French, Italian, and Sardinian data. These languages all have parallel binary systems, with the masculine selected by default (e.g. for gender resolution, non-agreement, or—in most cases—agreement with non-nominal controllers). While dialect variation is covered in the following chapters, here a flavour thereof is conveyed by introducing binary convergent systems, which represent a further development (due to sound change merging agreement targets in the plural) of the mainstream binary system. The chapter then reviews semantic and formal assignment rules. Romance gender systems are never entirely semantic, but they always have a semantic nucleus: names of male/female human beings and sex-differentiable animals are assigned masculine and feminine via semantic rule in all Romance languages. These differ widely in the extent to which formal (morphological and phonological) rules are at work, and in how these look.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michele Loporcaro
Keyword(s):  
Gender Studies ◽  
Binary Systems ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Cognitive Neuropsychology ◽  
Gender System ◽  
And Linguistics ◽  
Morphosyntactic Feature

‘Gender’ is a manifold notion, at the crossroads between sociology, biology, and linguistics. The Introduction delimits the scope of linguistic (or grammatical) gender, which is an inherent morphosyntactic feature of nouns in about half of the world’s languages, introducing the definitions and notions which the present work utilizes to investigate gender. While focusing on grammar, this study has implications far beyond (e.g. for gender studies), and capitalizes on findings from other disciplines, such as cognitive neuropsychology. The chapter introduces the basic aim of the monograph, which intends to account for the steps through which the Latin three-gender system was reshaped into the binary systems shared today by most standard Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, French, and Italian). One crucial definitional tool, highlighted in this chapter, is the distinction between target and controller genders: the two need not coincide everywhere, and mismatches between the two may arise—and did arise in Romance—through change.

Mass/countness and gender in Asturian

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michele Loporcaro
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Category ◽  
Concurrent Systems ◽  
Linguistic Typology ◽  
Economical Analysis ◽  
A Value ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Gender System

Having shown at the end of Chapter 4 that mass/count may be encoded in the gender system, this chapter analyses in depth one Romance variety where the interaction of the mass/count distinction with gender presents itself in a distinctly intricate way, viz. Central Asturian. This features a ‘neuter’ agreement that has been variously analysed as the exponent of a value of the morphosyntactic categories gender or number, or as manifesting the value of some other, purely semantic, category. Complementing the evidence with new data, the chapter concludes that the most economical analysis is one according to which the Asturian neuter is a gender value, but within a second gender system. In this, Asturian parallels a few far-off languages which, in recent studies in linguistic typology, have been argued to possess two concurrent systems for noun classification.

The gender system of Durop

2021 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 405-425
Author(s):  
Bruce Connell
Keyword(s):  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Present Approach ◽  
Cross River ◽  
University Of Leiden ◽  
Nominal Classification ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Gender System ◽  
Classification Agreement

Abstract This paper presents an analysis of grammatical gender and agreement in Durop, a language of the Upper Cross subgroup of Cross River. The data used are drawn from Kastelein (Kastelein, Bianca. 1994. A phonological and grammatical sketch of DuRop. Leiden: University of Leiden Scriptie), whose analysis treats gender as the singular – plural pairings of nouns different from the present approach. Kastelein identifies eight concord classes (agreement classes); these form the basis of gender in Durop in the present analysis; as many as 24 agreement classes are identified here. The various systems comprising nominal classification, agreement and gender in Durop are compared and discussed. The agreement system comprises three subsystems of differing numbers of agreement classes.

Grammatical Gender in the German Multiethnolect

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-29
Author(s):  
Peter Auer ◽  
Vanessa Siegel
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
First Language ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Grammatical Category ◽  
Immigrant Background ◽  
Frequent Use ◽  
Bare Nouns ◽  
Gender System ◽  
Germanic Languages

While major restructurings and simplifications have been reported for gender systems of other Germanic languages in multiethnolectal speech, this article demonstrates that the three-way gender distinction of German is relatively stable among young speakers from an immigrant background. We investigate gender in a German multiethnolect based on a corpus of approximately 17 hours of spontaneous speech produced by 28 young speakers in Stuttgart (mainly from Turkish and Balkan background). German is not their second language, but (one of) their first language(s), which they have fully acquired from childhood. We show that the gender system does not show signs of reduction in the direction of a two-gender system, nor of wholesale loss. We also argue that the position of gender in the grammar is weakened by independent innovations, such as the frequent use of bare nouns in grammatical contexts where German requires a determiner. Another phenomenon that weakens the position of gender is the simplification of adjective-noun agreement and the emergence of a generalized gender-neutral suffix for prenominal adjectives (that is, schwa). The disappearance of gender and case marking in the adjective means that the grammatical category of gender is lost in Adj + N phrases (without a determiner).

scholarly journals Concord, convergence and accommodation in bilingual children

2007 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 239-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDREW RADFORD ◽  
TANJA KUPISCH ◽  
REGINA KÖPPE ◽  
GABRIELE AZZARO
Keyword(s):  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
The Other ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Gender System

This paper examines the syntax of GENDER CONCORD in mixed utterances where bilingual children switch between a modifier in one language and a noun in another. Particular attention is paid to how children deal with potential gender mismatches between modifier and noun, i.e., if one of the languages has grammatical gender but the other does not, or if one of the languages has a ternary gender system and the other a binary one. We show that the English–Italian and French–German bilingual children in our study accommodate the gender properties of the noun to those of its modifiers in such cases, in order to ensure convergence.

scholarly journals Grammatical Gender Trouble and Hungarian Gender[lessness]. Part I: Comparative Linguistic Gender

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 143-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise O. Vasvári
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Issue ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Cultural Expectations ◽  
The World ◽  
Gender Trouble ◽  
Pronominal Gender

The aim of this study is to define linguistic gender[lessness], with particular reference in the latter part of the article to Hungarian, and to show why it is a feminist issue. I will discuss the [socio]linguistics of linguistic gender in three types of languages, those, like German and the Romance languages, among others, which possess grammatical gender, languages such as English, with only pronominal gender (sometimes misnamed ‘natural gender’), and languages such as Hungarian and other Finno-Ugric languages, as well as many other languages in the world, such as Turkish and Chinese, which have no linguistic or pronomial gender, but, like all languages, can make lexical gender distinctions. While in a narrow linguistic sense linguistic gender can be said to be afunctional, this does not take into account the ideological ramifications in gendered languages of the “leakage” between gender and sex[ism], while at the same time so-called genderless languages can express societal sexist assumptions linguistically through, for example, lexical gender, semantic derogation of women, and naming conventions. Thus, both languages with overt grammatical gender and those with gender-related asymmetries of a more covert nature show language to represent traditional cultural expectations, illustrating that linguistic gender is a feminist issue.

scholarly journals Gender agreement hierarchy in common gender and epicene nouns in Spanish

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 279-292
Author(s):  
Anastasiia Ogneva
Keyword(s):  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Grammatical Category ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Formal Rule ◽  
Gender System ◽  
Morphosyntactic Feature

Gender is a grammatical category defined as an abstract morphosyntactic feature of nouns reflected in characteristics of associated words (i.e. agreement) (Hockett, 1958; Corbett, 1991). Agreement is, in fact, easily established in “transparent” nouns which follow either semantic or formal rule of gender agreement. However, when we deal with ambiguous nouns regarding their gender, agreement is not straightforward. In this article we aim to pursue two main goals. Firstly, to review and briefly describe grammatical gender system in Spanish (§1) with a special focus on so called “ambiguous” or “problematic” nouns (§2). Secondly, to review agreement hierarchy theories and explore if they are applicable for Spanish epicenes and common gender nouns (§3). Discussion and conclusion remarks are presented in (§4).

scholarly journals Factors of success and failure in the acquisition of grammatical gender in Dutch

2008 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 267-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonie Cornips ◽  
Aafke Hulk
Keyword(s):  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Success Factors ◽  
Age Of Onset ◽  
Structural Similarity ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
Gender System

The goal of this article is to examine the factors that are proposed in the literature to explain the success—failure in the child L2 (second language) acquisition of grammatical gender in Dutch definite determiners. Focusing on four different groups of bilingual children, we discuss four external success factors put forward in the literature: (1) early age of onset, (2) lengthy and intensive input, (3) the quality of the input and (4) the role of the other language. We argue that the first two factors may indeed contribute to explaining the differences in success between the less and more successful bilingual children. However, the influence of the quality of the input in (standard) Dutch appears to be inconclusive, whereas the (structural) similarity of the gender systems in the two languages may reinforce the children's awareness of the grammatical gender category. Moreover, it appears that individual bilingualism vs. societal bilingualism, that is the sociolinguistic context in which Dutch is acquired, is not a factor for failure or success with respect to the acquisition of grammatical gender. In the final part of this article, we hypothesize that the important role of the input is related to a language internal factor, which distinguishes the Dutch gender system of the definite determiner from that of other languages, resulting in different acquisition paths.

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