The starting point

Author(s):  
Michele Loporcaro

The chapter describes the three-gender system of Latin, with a particular focus on the neuter gender: unlike the masculine and feminine, this was not only assigned to nouns as an inherent feature, and used to specify words from other word classes agreeing with those nouns, but it also served default functions in a range of contexts. Arguably, this property was inherited from (late) Proto-Indo-European, as was the three-way gender system itself, in which the neuter seems to have contrasted with masculine/feminine in terms of (in)animacy. Simplification of the gender system in most of Romance is placed in the broader Indo-European perspective, showing that in most branches the gender contrasts have reduced via a drift that reaches its endpoint in the eradication of grammatical gender in, for example Armenian or Farsi. Within this picture, some Romance dialects apparently deviate, showing complexification rather than simplification of the gender system.

Author(s):  
Jenny Audring ◽  
Sebastian Fedden

Grammatical gender systems vary widely across the languages of the world. Many conform to the canonical ideal in that each noun belongs to a single gender, and this gender is reflected in the agreement affixes on various words throughout the sentence. Other systems diverge from this ideal, some quite substantially. This chapter is the opening chapter of a unique collection of non-canonical gender systems from a variety of language families across the world. It outlines the theoretical perspective taken in the volume—Canonical Typology—and introduces the individual chapters, highlighting in what particular ways each language discussed in the book has a non-canonical gender system.


2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 837
Author(s):  
Mehmet Halit Atlı

<p>It is said that the learning/acquisition of German language as L2 is difficult. The possible reason for this opinion is German grammatical gender system, because it has a very unorderly and complex nature system. By each grammatical rules of this language has got a series of exception rules. We are witnessed that, both linguists and educators, who are expert in languages, as well as the people, who are not experts in the language, are often commented the multitude of exceptions in grammatical rules and the difficulty of grammatical gender system of this language. Some modern linguists say that, this language has no rules to determine the grammatical gender system and goes further and say, each substantive should be memorized with its definite article.</p><p>However, it is not correct to say that the language occurred from irregular structures, above all there is no language in the world, particularly the natural language occurs from a number of irregular structures. The modern linguistics says the building of words and sentence is not arbitrary, they occur in a certain harmony. However, many of the studies of descriptive linguistics analysis showed that, the leaner of German language acquired the grammatical gender system; during they handled the words in a process of morphological, semantic and phonological according some inductive rules. But in which extent the acquirers use the rules of this language as L2 and how they use exactly the rules is unknown.</p><p>In this study, we have showed the concept of grammatical gender, the use of its in German language, its specifications, functions and we have made a detailed examination of the various studies conducted on this issue. Furthermore, we have got soughed the answer of acquisition process of grammatical gender system and the formulated grammatical gender determination process by L2 learner.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Özet</strong></p><p>Almancanın yabancı dil (L2) olarak öğrenilmesi/edinilmesi zor bir dil olduğu söylenilir. Bu düşüncenin başlıca nedenlerinden biri tanesi bu dilde olup Türkçede olmayan çok kurallı ve karmaşık bir yapısı olan dilbilgisel cinsiyet sistemi ile her bir dilbilgisel kuralın yanında neredeyse bir dizi yan kuralın (istisna) daha bulunmasındandır. Bu dildeki dilbilgisel cinsiyet sisteminin çok kurallı ve karmaşıklığına ve dilbilgisindeki istisnaların çokluğuna ilişkin benzer açıklamalar, hem bu dilin uzmanı olan dilbilimci ve eğitmenler, hem de bu dilin uzmanı olmayan sıradan kişiler tarafından sık sık yapıldığına şahit oluyoruz.</p><p>Hatta bazı çağdaş dilbilimciler, bu dilin dilbilgisel cinsiyet sistemini belirlemenin hiçbir kuralı olmadığını ve her tekil ismin artikeli ile birlikte ezberlenmesi gerektiğini söyleyecek kadar ileri giderler. Hâlbuki dünyadaki hiçbir dilin, özellikle doğal dillerin bir takım kuralsız yapılardan meydana geldiğini ve bu yapıların öğreniminin/ediniminin semaî olduğunu söylemek doğru değildir. Çünkü modern dilbilim, doğal dillerde bazı kuralsız yapıların olmasına rağmen her dilin bir kurallar bütünü olduğunu, cümlelerin yapıtaşı olan kelimelerin dizilişinin rastgele olmadığını, sözdizimi ve kelime üretiminin belli bir ahenk içinde meydana geldiğini ortaya koymuştur. Betimleyici dilbilim çözümlemesi ile yapılan çalışmalarının birçoğu, dilbilgisel cinsiyet sistemini edinmeye çalışan öğrenicilerin öğrenme/edinme sürecinde biçimbilimsel, anlamsal ve ses bilimsel ilkelere bağlı bazı tümevarımlı kurallara göre hareket ettiklerini gösteriyor. Ancak bu dili L2 olarak edinmeye çalışanların bu kuralları hangi ölçüde ve nasıl kullandıkları sorularına ise tam olarak henüz cevap veril(e)memiştir.</p><p>Mevcut çalışmada, dilbilgisel cinsiyet kavramının ne olduğu, Almancadaki kullanımı, belirtkeleri, işlevi ve önceden nasıl belirleneceği hususunda bu konuda yapılan çeşitli çalışmaların ayrıntılı incelemesi yapılmıştır. Buna ilaveten dilbilgisel cinsiyet sistemi için formüle edilen dilbilgisel cinsiyet belirleme ilkelerinin L2 edinim işleme sürecinde ne kadar etkili kullanıldığı sorusuna cevap aranmıştır.</p>


Author(s):  
Michele Loporcaro

‘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.


Author(s):  
Michele Loporcaro

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.


2021 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 405-425
Author(s):  
Bruce Connell

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.


2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-29
Author(s):  
Peter Auer ◽  
Vanessa Siegel

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).


2007 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 239-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDREW RADFORD ◽  
TANJA KUPISCH ◽  
REGINA KÖPPE ◽  
GABRIELE AZZARO

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.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 279-292
Author(s):  
Anastasiia Ogneva

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).


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-158
Author(s):  
Adrián Rodríguez Iglesias

This study focuses on the use of a sociopragmatic methodology to research morphological phenomena. In particular, the study starts from the verification of new non-normative gender morphemes uses to make visible a part of the society that, according to the criticism of feminist linguistics to its normative usages, excludes them in its representation. So, the starting point of this study is to consider an associated perception of two phenomena: grammatical gender and (sociocultural) gender. This premise is treated as a sociocultural conditioning that enables the implementation of sociopragmatic research tools. The designed tool has enabled to determinate, on a scale of degrees, the preference, tolerance and refusal to these new gender morpheme uses in a given population segment, supporting the validity of sociopragmatic tools to study morphological phenomena.


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