Talk: Grammatical Gender Assignment in Modern Greek

This paper discusses the grammatical gender assignment in Modern Greek, claiming that gender is a feature to be assigned to all nouns in the language including the borrowed words

This paper discusses the grammatical gender assignment in Modern Greek, claiming that gender is a feature to be assigned to all nouns in the language including the borrowed words. Grammatical gender is known to be varied cross-linguistically, meaning that a word can have different grammatical genders across languages. Simply put, grammatical gender is a way of distinction or classification of nouns within a language, which later interacts with syntax as adjectives and articles should agree with the gender of the noun in the syntactic derivation. However, not being a way of classification solely, grammatical gender has drawn a considerable amount of attention in the literature for both theoretical approaches and cognitive & experimental approaches. It is even said to affect odor perception (Speed & Majid 2019; Maciuszek, Polak & Świątkowska, 2019). Another striking feature of grammatical gender is that if a loanword enters into a language, which has grammatical genders, native speakers of that language agree on the gender of the noun, which can show that grammatical gender has a cognitive basis, rather than simply being a way of classification of nouns, whose origin is said to “have been an accidental outcome of language development” (Ibrahim 2014). In the DM approach to grammatical gender, it is assumed to be a feature rather than being inherent in the stem. In this talk, I will provide the previous accounts of grammatical gender (Ralli, 2005), and show that this gender information cannot be part of the stem unlike Ralli (2005). Rather, it is a feature to be added onto the noun in the syntactic derivation.

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Day: 2020-11-19
Start time: 09:30
Duration: 00:30
Room: Agathe Lasch
Track: Theoretical Linguistics
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