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The Romanian alternating gender in diachrony and synchrony

  • Martin Maiden EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: November 8, 2016
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Abstract

Romanian has a large class of nouns characterized by masculine agreement in the singular and feminine agreement in the plural. This phenomenon of alternating gender is frequently argued by traditional grammarians of Romanian, Romance linguists, and linguist typologists to constitute a neuter or third gender, distinct from masculine and feminine. The present study argues, from close analysis of a wide range of diachronic and comparative dialectal data, that the neuter is in fact an epiphenomenon of agreement behaviour that depends crucially on the inflexional identity of the singular and plural forms of the nouns. Hypostatization of a third gender is dangerously liable to obfuscate the true mechanisms at work. Principled explanations of some apparent exceptions to my overall claim will be offered. I also investigate, however, some ways in which the emergence of a third gender of the type so widely assumed already to exist might be latent in Romanian, and speculate in general on how alternating gender might emerge diachronically.

Acknowledgement

The basis of the research for this study was laid as part of the Leverhulme Trust-funded project The Romance Noun. A Comparative-Historical Study in Plural Formation at the University of Oxford, 2011–2012.That support is gratefully acknowledged, as is the contribution of Chiara Cappellaro and J. C. Smith. I am also grateful to Oana Uță Bărbulescu for her advice, and to Michele Loporcaro for some extremely stimulating comments. The views expressed here are my own.

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Published Online: 2016-11-08
Published in Print: 2016-11-01

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