Schedule StuTS 65

The talk wants to challenge the perception and classi_cation of classical typological approaches to gender agreement systems as a conjunct of clear-cut classes of nouns. It sheds light on the case of feminine nouns designating animals of both natural genders (like lisica 'fox', _zaba 'frog', roda 'stork' in the case of Serbian) and the unexpected agreement patterns they cause in Romance and South-West Slavonic with predicative nouns compared to the (expected) agreement pattern with adjectives.

The qualitative analysis of Romance and South-West Slavonic following Corbett's multivariate typology (see Corbett: 1995 and Corbett: 209) shows that the semantic status of such nouns challenges the classic conception of the linguistic gender as a system of clearly delimited classes of nouns. In addition, the talk individuates semantic variables [+/- human] and [+/- female only], syntactical variables of the controller NP, like [+/- resolution], and morpho-syntactical variables of the target, canonical vs. non-canonical target, as major factors to cause unexpected patterns. The quantitative analysis and the comparison between Romance and South-West Slavic languages as well as with other languages, on the other hand, state similar trends on the edge of gender agreement systems of the two Indo-European branches.

References
Corbett, Greville (1995), Gender, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Corbett, Greville (2009), Agreement, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Info

Day: 2019-05-24
Start time: 15:30
Duration: 00:30
Room: 103/ S92
Track: Typology and Variational Linguistics
Language: en

Links:

• iCalendar

Files

• 2019_05_24_Gender_Agreement_Presentation.pdf

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