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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©2016 by De Gruyter Mouton
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Reading the intentions of be going to. On the subjectification of future markers
- Third-person singular zero in Norfolk English: An addendum
- Q is for WHAT, WHEN, WHERE?: The ‘q’ spellings for OE hw-
- The Romanian alternating gender in diachrony and synchrony
- Particle placement in Late Modern English and Twentieth-century English: Morpho-syntactic variables
- Language norms and language use: Hypercorrections in the Independence period of Chilean Spanish
- Basic valency orientation in Homeric Greek
- Why English is not dead: A rejoinder to Emonds and Faarlund
- Daily jottings: Preposition placement in English diaries and travel journals from 1500 to 1900
- Reviews
- James N. Adams: Social variation and the Latin language
- Emanuel J. Drechsel: Language contact in the early colonial Pacific: Maritime Polynesian Pidgin before Pidgin English
- Lucien Tesnière: Elements of structural syntax
- Carlotta Viti, ed.: Perspectives on historical syntax
- Buschfeld, Sarah, Thomas Hoffmann, Magnus Huber & Alexander Kautzsch: The evolution of Englishes. The dynamic model and beyond
- 2016. IE2.com. Online lexica for ancient Indo-European languages
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Reading the intentions of be going to. On the subjectification of future markers
- Third-person singular zero in Norfolk English: An addendum
- Q is for WHAT, WHEN, WHERE?: The ‘q’ spellings for OE hw-
- The Romanian alternating gender in diachrony and synchrony
- Particle placement in Late Modern English and Twentieth-century English: Morpho-syntactic variables
- Language norms and language use: Hypercorrections in the Independence period of Chilean Spanish
- Basic valency orientation in Homeric Greek
- Why English is not dead: A rejoinder to Emonds and Faarlund
- Daily jottings: Preposition placement in English diaries and travel journals from 1500 to 1900
- Reviews
- James N. Adams: Social variation and the Latin language
- Emanuel J. Drechsel: Language contact in the early colonial Pacific: Maritime Polynesian Pidgin before Pidgin English
- Lucien Tesnière: Elements of structural syntax
- Carlotta Viti, ed.: Perspectives on historical syntax
- Buschfeld, Sarah, Thomas Hoffmann, Magnus Huber & Alexander Kautzsch: The evolution of Englishes. The dynamic model and beyond
- 2016. IE2.com. Online lexica for ancient Indo-European languages