scholarly journals Gender Resolution in Croatian, Slavic and Proto-Indo-European

Fluminensia ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-29
Author(s):  
Ranko Matasović
Keyword(s):  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Historical Explanation ◽  
Feminine Gender ◽  
Slavic Languages ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Resolution Rule ◽  
The Common ◽  
Gender System ◽  
Germanic Languages ◽  
Masculine Gender

This paper deals with the origin and development of the gender resolution rule according to which the predicate adjective agrees with the masculine antecedent when there is agreement with a conjunction of subjects at least one of which denotes a male person. Apart from Croatian, such a rule exists (or existed) in the other Slavic languages, as well as in Baltic languages, so it can safely be posited for Proto-Slavic and Proto-Balto-Slavic. We further show that most contemporary and ancient Indo-European languages had such a gender resolution rule. Where such a rule does not exist (as in Germanic languages), there is a plausible historical explanation. In Hittite, which preserves the most ancient gender system of Indo-European (with only common and neuter genders, and no feminine gender), the default agreement is with the common gender noun. Recent advances in our understanding of the development of gender in Indo-European allow us to show that the rule taking the masculine as the default gender has developed from the rule taking the common gender as default. This is because the morphemes showing gender agreement on adjectives and pronouns of the masculine gender have developed from Early Proto-Indo-European morphemes expressing the common gender.

scholarly journals Gender Change in Norwegian Dialects: Comprehension is affected before Production

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (s1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Björn Lundquist ◽  
Yulia Rodina ◽  
Irina A. Sekerina ◽  
Marit Westergaard
Keyword(s):  
Spoken Word Recognition ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
Production Task ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Language Variation And Change ◽  
Feminine Gender ◽  
Indefinite Article ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Gender System ◽  
Gender Change

AbstractThis article investigates language variation and change in the grammatical gender system of Norwegian, where feminine gender agreement is in the process of disappearing in some Northern Norwegian dialects. Speakers of the Tromsø (N=46) and Sortland (N=54) dialects participated in a Visual Word experiment. The task examined whether they used indefinite articles (en, ei, et) predictively to identify nouns during spoken-word recognition, and whether they produced feminine articles in an elicited production task. Results show that all speakers used the neuter indefinite article et as a predictive cue, but no speakers used the feminine ei predictively, regardless of whether they produced it or not. The masculine article en was used predictively only by the speakers who did not produce feminine gender forms. We hypothesize that in dialects where the feminine gender is disappearing, this change in the gender system affects comprehension first, even before speakers stop producing the feminine indefinite article.

scholarly journals Quantitative Estimation of Grammatical Ambiguity: Case of European Languages

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-21
Author(s):  
Eduard S. Klyshinsky ◽  
Varvara K. Logacheva ◽  
Olesya V. Karpik ◽  
Alexander V. Bondarenko
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Estimation ◽  
Russian Language ◽  
High Rate ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Slavic Languages ◽  
Part Of Speech ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Ambiguous Words ◽  
Germanic Languages

The grammatical ambiguity (multiple sets of grammatical features for one word form or coinciding surface forms of different words) can be of different types. We distinguish six classes of grammatical ambiguity: unambiguous, ambiguous by grammatical features, by part of speech, by lemma, by lemma and part of speech, and out-of-vocabulary words. These classes are found in all languages, but word distribution may vary significantly. We calculated and analysed the statistics of these six ambiguity classes for a number of European languages. We found that the distribution of ambiguous words among these classes depends primarily on basic linguistic features of a language determining its typology class. Although it is influenced by text style and the considered vocabulary, the distinctive shape of the distribution is preserved under different conditions and differs significantly from distributions for other languages. The fact that the shape is primarily defined by linguistic properties is corroborated by the fact that closely related languages demonstrated in our research similar properties as far as their ambiguous words are concerned. We established that Slavic languages feature a low rate of part-of-speech ambiguous words and a high rate of words which are ambiguous by grammatical features. The former is also true for French and Italian, while the latter holds for German and Swedish, whereas the combination of these traits is characteristic of Slavic languages alone. The experiments showed that reduction of the grammatical feature set does not change the shape of distribution and therefore does not reflect similarity among languages. On the other hand, we found that the top 1000 most frequent words in all the languages considered have different distribution in ambiguity classes unlike in the rest of the words. At the same time, for the majority of considered languages, less frequent words are less unambiguous by part of speech. In Romance and Germanic languages, the ambiguity is reduced for less frequent words. We also investigated the differences in statistics for texts of different genres in the Russian language. We found out that fiction texts are more ambiguous by part of speech than newswire, which are in turn more ambiguous by grammatical features. Our results suggest that the quality of multilingual morphological taggers should be measured relying only on ambiguous words as opposed to all words of the processed text. Such an approach can help get a more objective linguistic picture and enhance the performance of linguistic tools.

scholarly journals On the Divergence of a Proto-Indo-European Velar Syllabic Nasal in Indo-European Languages

Discourse ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (5) ◽  
pp. 114-122
Author(s):  
G. M. Telezhko
Keyword(s):  
Opposite Direction ◽  
Divergent Evolution ◽  
Oak Forest ◽  
Water Bird ◽  
Slavic Languages ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Nasal Vowels ◽  
Proposed Model ◽  
The Common ◽  
Nasal Consonant

Introduction. The proposed article critically examines the explanation of the origin of nasal vowels in Slavic languages by incorporating an open syllable law. It is shown that the convergence of many closed syllables, ending with nasal consonants, into two kinds of open syllables with nasal vowels contradicts a number of facts of evolution in the opposite direction, e. g., evolution of nasal vowels towards combinations ”a vowel – a nasal consonant“ in Balkan Slavic languages (Bulg. пент ”five“, вънзел ”knot“), as well as to the observed interpretation of Slavic nasal vowels in acts of borrowing by languages without nasal vowels, e. g. OCS дѫбрава ”oak forest“ > Rom. dumbrávă. Methodology and sources. The proposed model results from generalization of the data of instrumental phonetical research, which show that the articulation of palatal consonants is unstable leading to there divergent evolution, i. e. transformation to sounds with more definite zones of articulation, e. g. palatal lateral approximant *[ʎ] split into palatalized lateral liquid [l'] and fricative [j]. In the proposed model Proto-Indo-European (PIE) syllable velar nasal consonant *ŋ̍ in the process of its phonetic evolution in Indo-European (IE) languages split into a variety of nasal vowels with different articulations, which further on irregularly transformed into vowels without nasalization or into combinations of vowels with nasal consonants (e. g. OInd. paŋktíṣ, OIsl. fimt, Lith. penkì, OCS пѩть, OHG finf, fimf, funf "пять", etc., from the common PIE prototype with syllable nasal *ŋ̍). Results and discussion. Examples of PIE prototypes of lexemes meaning “water bird”, “tooth, sharp edge”, “five”, as well as lexemes, related to Russ. нутро, ядро, неясыть, уж, угорь, нагой, нога, ноготь are presented. All prototypes contain a nasal syllabic, which is split producing four types of reflexes in IE languages. Newly discovered etymological links, such as the connection between Russ. Lexemes meaning “leg” and “corner”, are discussed.Conclusion. The proposed model permits to uniformly explain the facts of synchronous existence of related Rus. недро ”insides“ and ядро ”nucleos“, related нутро и утроба ”belly“, related OCS ѫты, Lith. ántis and AGr. Att. νῆττα “duck”, related Rus. неясыть “a kind of owl; pelican” and ненасытный “insatiable”, etc., using the notion of divergent evolution of the PIE syllable velar nasal *ŋ̍. 

scholarly journals Investigating Gender Assignment Strategies in Mixed Purepecha–Spanish Nominal Constructions

Languages ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Bellamy ◽  
M. Parafita Couto ◽  
Hans Stadthagen-Gonzalez
Keyword(s):  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Task Type ◽  
Comparable Data ◽  
Production Task ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Gender Assignment ◽  
Future Studies ◽  
Feminine Gender ◽  
Translation Equivalent ◽  
Masculine Gender

Purepecha has no grammatical gender, whereas Spanish has a binary masculine–feminine system. In this paper we investigate how early sequential Purepecha–Spanish bilinguals assign gender to Purepecha nouns inserted into an otherwise Spanish utterance, using a director-matcher production task and an online forced-choice acceptability judgement task. The results of the production task indicate a strong preference for masculine gender, irrespective of the gender of the noun’s translation equivalent, the so-called “masculine default” option. Participants in the comprehension task were influenced by the orthography of the Purepecha noun in the -a ending condition, leading them to assign feminine gender agreement to nouns that are masculine in Spanish, but preferred the masculine default strategy again in the -i/-u ending condition. The absence of the “analogical criterion” in both tasks contrasts with the results of some previous studies, underlining the need for more comparable data in terms of task type. Our results also highlight how task type can influence the choices speakers make, in this context, in terms of the choice of grammatical gender agreement strategy. Task type should therefore be carefully controlled in future studies.

Eskimo word order variation and its contact-induced perturbation

1993 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-289 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Fortescue
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Order Type ◽  
Slavic Languages ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Word Order Variation ◽  
Order Variation ◽  
The Common ◽  
Prague School ◽  
Free Word ◽  
Basic Order

Eskimo languages are commonly characterized as displaying rather ‘free’ word order as compared to the major western European languages. Nevertheless, there is in West Greenlandic at least a clearly dominant, pragmatically neutral ordering pattern. Deviation from this – when possible at all – results in specifiable contextual marking (the factors involved will be discussed and illustrated in section 2). In fact, the degree of ‘freedom’ involved may vary considerably from dialect to dialect (and from language to language), also through time and according to register/medium. Specifically I shall be claiming that no Eskimo dialect is of the purely pragmatically based word order type (lacking a syntactic ‘basic order’) which Mithun claims is typical for polysynthetic languages with inflected verbs that can stand as independent sentences (Mithun, 1987: 323). Unlike the type of language that Mithun describes, which includes (Iroquoian) Cayuga and (‘Penutian’) Coos, for example, I shall argue that West Greenlandic (WG), a highly polysynthetic language, behaves more like Slavic languages in this respect, though the ‘neutral’ pattern there is of course SVO rather than SOV. Much as described for Czech and Russian by the Prague School functionalists, word order in WG seems to reflect the common ‘functional sentence perspective’ whereby – ignoring postposed ‘afterthought/clarificatory’ material – early position in the sentence is associated with given material of low communicative dynamism, whereas later position is associated with new or important material of high communicative dynamism (see Firbas, 1974). This is the reverse of the situation described by Mithun.

Nominal Gender in Coptic Egyptian

2021 ◽  
Vol 148 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-49
Author(s):  
Sabrina Bendjaballah ◽  
Chris H. Reintges
Keyword(s):  
Interdisciplinary Research ◽  
Quantitative Data ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Gender Assignment ◽  
Stress Assignment ◽  
Feminine Gender ◽  
Noun Class ◽  
Gender System ◽  
Masculine Gender

Summary The interdisciplinary research (philology, typology, morphology, phonology) presented here explores the role of gender in the meaning and morphology of Coptic nouns. Coptic has a predominantly grammatical gender system, albeit with a niche for semantically based gender assignment. The gender system marks a three-way semantic contrast between a [male] versus a [female] versus an [unspecified] gender value, even where the morphology draws only a two-way distinction between grammatical masculine and feminine gender. By integrating quantitative data and morphophonological analysis, we shall argue that masculine gender is morphologically unmarked. Although no discrete morpheme can be identified, feminine gender is always morphologically marked on nouns. Masculine and feminine nouns are distinguished in terms of their templatic structure, which interacts in complex ways with vowel distributions, stress assignment, and noun class.

scholarly journals Gender Assignment in Six North Scandinavian Languages: Patterns of Variation and Change

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 264-315
Author(s):  
Briana Van Epps ◽  
Gerd Carling ◽  
Yair Sapir
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Analysis ◽  
Word Frequency ◽  
Old Norse ◽  
Gender Assignment ◽  
Feminine Gender ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Old Swedish ◽  
Gender System ◽  
Gender Change

This study addresses gender assignment in six North Scandinavian varieties with a three-gender system: Old Norse, Norwegian (Nynorsk), Old Swedish, Nysvenska, Jamtlandic, and Elfdalian. Focusing on gender variation and change, we investigate the role of various factors in gender change. Using the contemporary Swedish varieties Jamtlandic and Elfdalian as a basis, we compare gender assignment in other North Scandinavian languages, tracing the evolution back to Old Norse. The data consist of 1,300 concepts from all six languages coded for cognacy, gender, and morphological and semantic variation. Our statistical analysis shows that the most important factors in gender change are the Old Norse weak/strong inflection, Old Norse gender, animate/inanimate distinction, word frequency, and loan status. From Old Norse to modern languages, phonological assignment principles tend to weaken, due to the general loss of word-final endings. Feminine words are more susceptible to changing gender, and the tendency to lose the feminine is noticeable even in the varieties in our study upholding the three-gender system. Further, frequency is significantly correlated with unstable gender. In semantics, only the animate/inanimate distinction signifi-cantly predicts gender assignment and stability. In general, our study confirms the decay of the feminine gender in the Scandinavian branch of Germanic.

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 The development of Germanic analytical tenses

2020 ◽  
pp. 135-154
Author(s):  
Andriy Botsman ◽  
Olga Dmytruk ◽  
Tamara Kozlovska
Keyword(s):  
Language Development ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Research Method ◽  
Future Tense ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Present Tense ◽  
Germanic Languages

The stages that encompass the future tense development are singled out as discrete phenomena within the process of the Germanic language development. The Gothic verb system can serve as the background for the investigation of the tense transformations in question. The difficulties of tense examination in the Old Germanic languages were connected with some conceptions about the Indo-Iranian and Greek languages that used to dominate in the scientific circles for a long time. Those conceptions were based on Latin and Greek patterns and postulated the use of present, past and future tenses in all Indo-European languages. The above conceptions were ruined when the study of Tokharian and Hittite demonstrated the use of the present tense for the description of future actions. The idea of losing “the protolanguage inheritance” was proved wrong, and it was incorrect to transfer the complex tense system of Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin to other Proto-Indo-European languages. The examination of the tense differentiation in Gothic (as the main source of the Old Germanic language) demonstrates that the Gothic infinitive functioned as a no-particular-time unit, while personal verb forms were involved in performing tense functions. The Gothic present tense verbs represented present and future tenses and no-particular-time phenomena. Some periphrastic forms containing preterite-present verbs with the infinitive occurred sporadically. The periphrastic forms correlated with Greek and Latin patterns of the same future tense meaning. The periphrastic future forms in Gothic often contained some modal shades of meaning. The Gothic present tense functioned as a colony-forming archi-unit and a pluripotential (temporal) precursor. The periphrastic Gothic future forms are recognised as a monopotential (temporal) precursor with some modal meaning. The key research method used in the present article is the comparative historical method. The authors viewed it as the most reliable and appropriate for the study of tense forms.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document