Four-gender systems in Indo-European

Michele Loporcaro; Tania Paciaroni

doi:10.1515/flin.2011.015

Article

Four-gender systems in Indo-European

Michele Loporcaro and Tania Paciaroni

Published/Copyright: October 19, 2011

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From the journal Volume 45 Issue 2

A long-established tenet of Indo-European linguistics says that grammatical gender systems all along the history of this language phylum were maximally tripartite and generally tended toward a reduction of gender contrasts. In this article, we shall show that this widely-held idea overlooks the existence of four-gender systems in a substantial part of the Romance language family, a fact that has in turn gone unnoticed so far. We shall provide an analysis of the relevant Romance data, a sketchy comparison with other four-gender systems described in linguistic typological research, and a detailed reconstruction of how the gender systems in question might have developed in the Latin-Romance transition.

Keywords:: grammatical gender (target vs. controller); language change; Indo-European/Romance historical linguistics; dialect variation

Published Online: 2011-10-19

Published in Print: 2011-October

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/flin.2011.015

Keywords for this article

grammatical gender (target vs. controller); language change; Indo-European/Romance historical linguistics; dialect variation