Different number, different gender
Comparing Romanian and Guébie
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22130652 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ruth Kramer (0009-0000-4818-2577, Georgetown University), Hannah Sande (0000-0003-1335-8717, University of California, Berkeley) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 8 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Publication date | 2023-05-19 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Glossa a journal of general linguistics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2397-1835 • E-ISSN: 2397-1835 |
| Publisher | Open Library of the Humanities (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.16995/glossa.5855 |
| OpenAlex | W4366299285 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 31 |
Many languages contain nouns that seem to have different genders in the singular and in the plural. In this paper, we investigate two languages with this kind of “ambigeneric” noun: Romanian (Romance; Romania) and Guébie (Kru; Côte d’Ivoire). Romanian is well-known for its ambigeneric nouns, traditionally referred to as neuter, but ambigeneric nouns in Guébie have not been previously studied. While Guébie is unrelated to Romanian, and its gender system is based on different features, the ambigeneric nouns in the two languages are strikingly similar. Building on the analysis of Romanian in Kramer 2015ab, we argue for a unified Distributed Morphology analysis of ambigeneric nouns in Romanian and Guébie. Specifically, we claim that (i) ambigeneric nouns lack gender features, and (ii) the ambigeneric pattern is generated through a handful of Impoverishment operations. We show how alternative approaches to ambigeneric nouns face empirical and conceptual challenges in accounting for Romanian and Guébie. Overall, the analysis supports the cross-linguistic approach to gender features developed in Kramer 2015a, where “neuter” nouns lack gender features, and it provides evidence in favor of a Distributed Morphology approach to ambigeneric nouns in general
Grammatical Gender · Linguistics · Noun · Plural · Proper noun · Romance languages · Romanian · Computer Science · Gender Studies in Language · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Mathematics · Natural Language Processing Techniques · Philosophy · Psychology
Lexical Plurals
The Morphosyntax of Gender
Gender switch in Sidaama
Grammatical Gender
Morphologically conditioned phonology with two triggers
Gender
Possible syntactic implementations of the controller vs. target gender distinction
The phonology of Guébie
A note on long extraction in Vata and the ECP
Phonologically determined nominal concord as post-syntactic
A Typology of Consonant Agreement as Correspondence
The "Neuter" in Romance
Cross-word morphologically conditioned scalar tone shift in Guébie
ɸ-Features at the Syntax-Semantics Interface
Gender features and interpretation
E-Type Anaphora as NP-Deletion
Valence and Atomic Number
Remarks on lexical knowledge
On the visibility of word-internal morphological features
A unified account of conditioned phonological alternations
Marked Targets versus Marked Triggers and Impoverishment of the Dual
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |