Search results for "Grammatical gender"
showing 10 items of 10 documents
The Loss of Grammatical Gender and Case Features Between Old and Early Middle English: Its Impact on Simple Demonstratives and Topic Shift
2017
AbstractIn this paper we examine the relation between the loss of formal gender and Case features on simple demonstratives and the topic shifting property they manifest. The examination period spans between Old English and Early Middle English. While we argue that this loss has important discourse-pragmatic and derivational effects on demonstratives, we also employ the Strong Minimalist Hypothesis approach (Chomsky 2001) and feature valuation, as defined in Pesetsky & Torrego (2007), to display how their syntactic computation and pragmatic properties have come about. To account for the above innovations yielding the Early Middle Englishϸe(‘the’), we first discuss the formal properties o…
The Neural Correlates of Grammatical Gender: An fMRI Investigation
2002
Abstract In an fMRI experiment, subjects saw a written noun and made three distinct decisions in separate sessions: Is its grammatical gender masculine or feminine (grammatical feature task)? Is it an animal or an artifact (semantic task)? Does it contain a /tch/ or a /k/ sound (phonological task)? Relative to the other experimental conditions, the grammatical feature task activated areas of the left middle and inferior frontal gyrus and of the left middle and inferior temporal gyrus. These activations fit in well with neuropsychological studies that document the correlation between left frontal lesions and damage to morphological processes in agrammatism, and the correlation between left t…
Der s-Plural im Alemannischen.
2019
It is commonly agreed that the plural -s has become a part of Standard German inflection, yet in dialects such as Alemannic it is often seen as an intruder. We challenge this view based on data from a written survey amongst speakers of Swiss German dialects. Our analysis of pluralised loanwords (e. g. Mango) and abbreviations (e. g. WG ‘flat share’) shows a strong effect of both speakers’ age and grammatical gender that points towards a progressive integration of the plural -s into the dialectal system.
 While masculine and neuter nouns can express number syntagmatically (using articles that differ in singular and plural), feminine nouns rely heavily on suffixes (as the definite articl…
Grammaticalization in Slavic languages
2012
Abstract This article examines the grammaticalisation developments in Slavic languages. The functions of the past tenses lost in northern Slavic are only partially covered by the younger opposition of perfective and imperfective aspect. The only new classes of morphemes that arose in some sub-areas of Slavic are the definite and the indefinite article, both with preliminary, not-yet-grammaticalised stages in some more Slavic varieties. In sum, in Slavic grammaticalization, phenomena have occurred predominantly in the realm of verbal categories; only very few phenomena are related to the noun phrase.
Cultural References and Linguistic Exponents of Gender in the Norwegian Translation of Michał Witkowski’s Lubiewo
2019
The novel Lubiewo by the Polish writer Michal Witkowski has been called by its reviewers “a homosexual Decamerone.” The atmosphere of the book ranges from bright situational comic through bizarre tragicomic to serious reflection, and the narration structure resembles Boccaccio’s. The heroes (or heroines) of the novel belong to a complicated and internally split world of Polish homosexuals. Their sociolects and registers are, at first glance, barely translatable into Germanic languages: partly because of the Polish grammatical gender system, partly because of their extremely deep anchoring in the Polish culture. In this chapter, the Norwegian translation of Lubiewo is compared to the novel’s…
Ipocoristici italiani di nuovo conio
2021
this essay examines hypocoristica in Italian by drawing a comparison between one of the traditional models and an innovative one. In recent decades the latter has grown in importance and has thus become hegemonic in everyday language. the diachronic, historical, and sociolinguistic aspects of this innovation are discussed along with a functional and formal analysis and a number of related empirical and theoretical issues.
neutering neuter – grammatical gender and the dehumanisation of women in German
2021
Grammatical gender in German has traditionally been described as a rather arbitrary system (Helbig and Buscha 1988). This is not the case in regard to terms of person reference, where natural gender assignment is the norm: Masculine and feminine grammatical gender largely correlate with the extralinguistic assignment of male and female gender. Neuter gender predominantly denotes inanimate entities (Köpcke and Zubin 1996, 2009). The use of neutral gender in reference to women nevertheless has a long history in German, usually with pejorative connotations (Köpcke and Zubin 1996, 2009). Historically, this can be illustrated in relation to nouns, pronouns and articles: 1 By neuter nouns denotin…
English translation of the Quran by women: the challenges of “gender balance” in and through language
2011
This paper aims to explore and discuss how women translators of the Quran have dealt with the patriarchal linguistic elements in the source text by focusing on two main challenges of translation. First the problem of gender agreement differences between the target and the source language. Because Arabic is highly gendered and English is not, many feminine nouns, pronouns and verbs become invisible in English and as result the “gender balance” created in original could be lost in the translation. The second challenge they face lies in the use of masculine nouns and pronouns in the generic sense, which as many feminists argued assumes generic human to be male and excludes the “human woman.” T…
The morpheme gender effect.
2008
In three experiments we explored the mental representation of morphologically complex words in French. Subjects were asked to perform a gender decision task on morphologically complex words that were of the same gender as their base or not. We found that gender decisions were made more slowly for morphologically complex words made from a base with an opposite gender compared to words for which the gender of the base matches that of the derived noun. Similar results were obtained for words that are pseudo-morphologically complex while no effect was observed for non-morphological embedded words. Our results suggest that during gender identification of derived and pseudo-derived words, morphem…
The relation between language and cognition in 3- to 9-year-olds: the acquisition of grammatical gender in French.
2007
International audience; The French language has a grammatical gender system in which all nouns are assigned either a masculine or a feminine gender. Nouns provide two types of gender cues that can potentially guide gender attribution: morphophonological cues carried by endings and semantic cues (natural gender). The first goal of this study was to describe the acquisition of the probabilistic system based on phonological oppositions on word endings by French-speaking children. The second goal was to explore the extent to which this system affects categorization. In the study, 3- to 9-year-olds assigned gender categorization to invented nouns whose endings were typically masculine, typically…