scholarly journals Interpretation of Grammatical Category of Gender by Fernão de Oliveira

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 481-488
Author(s):  
S. V. Arkhipov
Keyword(s):  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Gender Classification ◽  
Grammatical Category ◽  
Continuous Sampling ◽  
Linguistic Data ◽  
Gender Category ◽  
Nasal Vowels ◽  
Definition Of

The present research featured the definition of grammatical gender category as it was coined by Fernão’s de Oliveira (1507–1581), a prominent Portuguese linguist that wrote the first Grammar of the Portuguese Language (1536), where he outlaid the main principles of gender classification. The research was based on F. de Oliveira’s works, namely The Grammar of the Portuguese Language, The Art of Sea Warfare, The Voyage of Fernão de Magalhães, and The Book of Shipbuilding. The linguistic data were selected from the above-mentioned works based on linguistic criteria by the method of continuous sampling. The article also describes various gender definition methods, e.g. morphonology, morphology, anaphora, syntax, secondary morphologization, words of one flexion, and vocalic inflexion (alternation of open and closed, pure and nasal vowels). The analysis of Oliveira’s speculations on grammatical gender revealed that the Portuguese grammarian failed to cover the issues of Singularia / Pluralia tantum, grammatical doublets, toponyms, epicenes, possessive pronouns, and participles.

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 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 Gender and Rural History: A Roundtable

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Cabana ◽  
Colin R. Johnson ◽  
Henry French ◽  
Leen Van Molle
Keyword(s):  
Rural History ◽  
Gender Category ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of

The aim of this debate article is to promote a discussion of a historiographical nature (not ideological, not political) about the meaning, place and role of gender in both the rural past and the rural historiography. The discussion revolves around a variety of questions, ranging from the relevance, the opportunity and the very history of the use of gender category in rural history, to the analysis of gender (im)balances in the community of historians working in this broadly defined field of studies, not to mention the very definition of what is meant by gender. These and other related topics, for which there are no single or definitive answers, are debated here in a roundtable format.

Signal Recovery

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert J Marks II
Keyword(s):  
Interpolation Problem ◽  
Super Resolution ◽  
Sampling Theorem ◽  
Signal Recovery ◽  
Continuous Sampling ◽  
Bandlimited Signals ◽  
Special Cases ◽  
Extrapolation Problem ◽  
Definition Of

The literature on the recovery of signals and images is vast (e.g., [23, 110, 112, 257, 391, 439, 791, 795, 933, 934, 937, 945, 956, 1104, 1324, 1494, 1495, 1551]). In this Chapter, the specific problem of recovering lost signal intervals from the remaining known portion of the signal is considered. Signal recovery is also a topic of Chapter 11 on POCS. To this point, sampling has been discrete. Bandlimited signals, we will show, can also be recovered from continuous samples. Our definition of continuous sampling is best presented by illustration.Asignal, f (t), is shown in Figure 10.1a, along with some possible continuous samples. Regaining f (t) from knowledge of ge(t) = f (t)Π(t/T) in Figure 10.1b is the extrapolation problem which has applications in a number of fields. In optics, for example, extrapolation in the frequency domain is termed super resolution [2, 40, 367, 444, 500, 523, 641, 720, 864, 1016, 1099, 1117]. Reconstructing f (t) from its tails [i.e., gi(t) = f (t){1 − Π(t/T)}] is the interval interpolation problem. Prediction, shown in Figure 10.1d, is the problem of recovering a signal with knowledge of that signal only for negative time. Lastly, illustrated in Figure 10.1e, is periodic continuous sampling. Here, the signal is known in sections periodically spaced at intervals of T. The duty cycle is α. Reconstruction of f (t) from this data includes a number of important reconstruction problems as special cases. (a) By keeping αT constant, we can approach the extrapolation problem by letting T go to ∞. (b) Redefine the origin in Figure 10.1e to be centered in a zero interval. Under the same assumption as (a), we can similarly approach the interpolation problem. (c) Redefine the origin as in (b). Then the interpolation problem can be solved by discarding data to make it periodically sampled. (d) Keep T constant and let α → 0. The result is reconstructing f (t) from discrete samples as discussed in Chapter 5. Indeed, this model has been used to derive the sampling theorem [246]. Figures 10.1b-e all illustrate continuously sampled versions of f (t).

scholarly journals Mirativity in Mandarin: The Sentence-Final Particle Le (了)

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 589-607 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hongmei Fang
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Grammatical Category ◽  
Final Particle ◽  
Discourse Grammar ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Interpersonal Level

Abstract Mirativity is a distinct grammatical category. In the literature, no mirative marker has been identified so far in Mandarin Chinese. This paper aims to argue that Mandarin Chinese is a language that has grammatical means of expressing mirativity. The sentence-final particle le (SF le) in Mandarin is a mirative marker in its own right. It encodes the information as newsworthy or surprising and occurs with different time references and Illocutions. Based on the data from SF le, this paper extends the definition of mirativity given by Hengeveld & Olbertz (2012) by proposing that mirativity can not only be targeted towards either the speaker or the addressee, but also towards both. Lastly, it is argued that mirativity should be accounted for at the layer of Communicated Content at the Interpersonal Level in Functional Discourse Grammar.

scholarly journals The International Vocabulary of Russian and Slovenian Languages: Gender Category

2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-86
Author(s):  
Jelena Konickaja
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Time Factor ◽  
Separate Group ◽  
Feminine Gender ◽  
Gender Determination ◽  
Gender Category ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
Gender Characteristics

Slovenian and Russian substantive internationalisms of different grammatical gender are compared in the present article. Five groups of internationalisms have been distinguished on the basis of the formed glossary based on the dictionaries of the two languages which includes about 450 pairs of lexemes with different gender characteristics: 1) Slovenian feminine ~ Russian masculine; 2) Slovenian masculine ~ Russian feminine; 3) Slovenian masculine ~ Russian neuter; 4) Slovenian feminine ~ Russian neuter; animated nouns constitute a separate group. The significant difference is the small number of neuter gender internationalisms in Slovenian, while there are a great number of such internationalisms in Russian; as well as the predominance of feminine gender borrowings in Slovenian. The analysis has illustrated that the internationalisms gender in both languages is determined by a common set of factors (the influence of gender of the prototype word, features of the morphological category of gender in language, lexical and semantic characteristics), which have different importance in the two languages. The influence of the prototype word gender is mainly characteristic in Slovenian, while structural and paradigmatic factors play a much larger role in Russian. The differences in the donor languages are of great importance for understanding the gender distinction of internationalisms in Slovenian and Russian. The time factor is more evident in Russian, where there is a gradual increasing importance of a paradigmatic factor in the gender determination of a number of borrowings, whereas for Slovenian, where a number of borrowings-internationalisms were formed later, the time factor does not play a big role.

The History of the Present English Subjunctive

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lilo Moessner
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Corpus Linguistics ◽  
Qualitative Method ◽  
Grammatical Category ◽  
History Of ◽  
Statistical Program ◽  
Adverbial Clauses ◽  
Definition Of

Based on the definition of the subjunctive as a realisation of the grammatical category mood and an expression of the semantic/pragmatic category modality the book presents the first comprehensive and consistent description of the history of the present English subjunctive. It covers the periods Old English (OE), Middle English (ME), and Early Modern English (EModE), and it considers all contruction types in which the subjunctive is attested, namely main clauses, noun clauses, relative clauses, and adverbial clauses. Besides numerically substantiating the well-known hypothesis that the simplification of the verbal syntagm led to a long-term frequency decrease of the subjunctive, it explores the factors which governed its competition with other verbal expressions. The data used for the analysis come from The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts; they comprise nearly half a million words in 91 files. Their analysis was carried out by close reading, and the results of the analysis were processed with the statistical program SPSS. This combined quantitative-qualitative method offers new insights into the research landscape of English subjunctive use and into the fields of historical English linguistics and corpus linguistics.

Statistische Modellierung

2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Th. Gries
Keyword(s):  
Model Selection ◽  
Statistical Modeling ◽  
Statistical Models ◽  
Modeling Processes ◽  
General Definition ◽  
Linguistic Data ◽  
Definition Of

AbstractThis paper provides an overview of central aspects of statistical modeling of linguistic data. Starting from a general definition of model, the paper discusses the goals of modeling as well as a variety of issues bearing upon the formulation/definition of statistical models. It then surveys model selection, the choice of ‘the best model’ and three fundamental notions affecting the interpretation of models. Finally, the paper turns to validation and replicability and addresses a variety of challenges researchers face during modeling processes.

scholarly journals No Nouns, No Verbs: Psycholinguistic Arguments in Favor of Lexical Underspecification

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Barner ◽  
Alan C. Bale
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Mental Representation ◽  
Developmental Psychology ◽  
Neurological Deficits ◽  
Grammatical Category ◽  
Lexical Categories ◽  
Definition Of

It is often assumed that the primitive units of grammar are words that aremarked for grammatical category (e.g., DiSciullo, A.M., Williams, E., 1987.On the Definition of Word: MIT Press, Cambridge, MA). Based on a review ofresearch in linguistics, neurolinguistics, and developmental psychology, weargue that dividing the lexicon into categories such as noun and verb offersno descriptive edge, and adds unnecessary complexity to both the theory ofgrammar and language acquisition. Specifically, we argue that a theorywithout lexical categories provides a better account of creative languageuse and category-specific neurological deficits, while also offering anatural solution to the bootstrapping problem in language acquisition(Pinker, S., 1982. A theory of the acquisition of lexico-interpretivegrammars. In: Bresnan, J. (Ed.), The Mental Representation of GrammaticalRelations. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 655– 726).

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