The Morphosyntax of Gender

The Morphosyntax of Gender
Author: Ruth T. Kramer
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2015
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0199679940

This book presents a new approach to gender and its effects on morphosyntax. Using data from genetically diverse languages such as Amharic, Somali, and Romanian, it provides one of the first large-scale, cross-linguistically-oriented, theoretical approaches to the word and sentence structure effects of gender.

The Morphosyntax of Gender

The Morphosyntax of Gender
Author: Ruth T. Kramer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2015
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0199679932

This book presents a new cross-linguistic analysis of gender and its effects on morphosyntax. It addresses questions including the syntactic location of gender features; the role of natural gender; and the relationship between syntactic gender features and the morphological realization of gender. Ruth Kramer argues that gender features are syntactically located on the n head ('little n'), which serves to nominalize category-neutral roots. Those gender features are either interpretable, as in the case of natural gender, or uninterpretable, like the gender of an inanimate noun in Spanish. Adopting Distributed Morphology, the book lays out how the gender features on n map onto the gender features relevant for morphological exponence. The analysis is supported by an in-depth case study of Amharic, which poses challenges for previous gender analyses and provides clear support for gender on n. The proposals generate a typology of two- and three-gender systems, with the various types illustrated using data from a genetically diverse set of languages. Finally, further evidence for gender being on n is provided from case studies of Somali and Romanian, as well as from the relationship between gender and other linguistic phenomena including derived nouns and declension class. Overall, the book provides one of the first large-scale, cross-linguistically-oriented, theoretical approaches to the morphosyntax of gender.

Grammatical gender and linguistic complexity I

Grammatical gender and linguistic complexity I
Author: Francesca Di Garbo
Publisher: Language Science Press
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2019
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3961101787

The many facets of grammatical gender remain one of the most fruitful areas of linguistic research, and pose fascinating questions about the origins and development of complexity in language. The present work is a two-volume collection of 13 chapters on the topic of grammatical gender seen through the prism of linguistic complexity. The contributions discuss what counts as complex and/or simple in grammatical gender systems, whether the distribution of gender systems across the world’s languages relates to the language ecology and social history of speech communities. Contributors demonstrate how the complexity of gender systems can be studied synchronically, both in individual languages and over large cross-linguistic samples, and diachronically, by exploring how gender systems change over time. In addition to three chapters on the theoretical foundations of gender complexity, volume one contains six chapters on grammatical gender and complexity in individual languages and language families of Africa, New Guinea, and South Asia. This volume is complemented by volume two, which consists of three chapters providing diachronic and typological case studies, followed by a final chapter discussing old and new theoretical and empirical challenges in the study of the dynamics of gender complexity.

Describing Morphosyntax

Describing Morphosyntax
Author: Thomas E. Payne
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 434
Release: 1997-10-09
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780521588058

Of the 6000 languages now spoken throughout the world around 3000 may become extinct during the next century. This guide gives linguists the tools to describe them, syntactically and grammatically, for future reference.

Manual of Romance Morphosyntax and Syntax

Manual of Romance Morphosyntax and Syntax
Author: Andreas Dufter
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 1104
Release: 2017-09-25
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110393425

This volume offers theoretically informed surveys of topics that have figured prominently in morphosyntactic and syntactic research into Romance languages and dialects. We define syntax as being the linguistic component that assembles linguistic units, such as roots or functional morphemes, into grammatical sentences, and morphosyntax as being an umbrella term for all morphological relations between these linguistic units, which either trigger morphological marking (e.g. explicit case morphemes) or are related to ordering issues (e.g. subjects precede finite verbs whenever there is number agreement between them). All 24 chapters adopt a comparative perspective on these two fields of research, highlighting cross-linguistic grammatical similarities and differences within the Romance language family. In addition, many chapters address issues related to variation observable within individual Romance languages, and grammatical change from Latin to Romance.

Heritage Languages and Their Speakers

Heritage Languages and Their Speakers
Author: Maria Polinsky
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2018-08-16
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1107047641

A pioneering study of heritage languages, from a leading scholar in this area of study world-wide.

The Morphosyntax of Albanian and Aromanian Varieties

The Morphosyntax of Albanian and Aromanian Varieties
Author: M. Rita Manzini
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2018-10-08
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1501505149

This book deals with Albanian, including the dialects spoken in Southern Italy, and with the Aromanian spoken in Southern Albania. These languages are set in the context of current generative research on syntax, morphology, language variation and contact – yielding insights into key morphosyntactic notions of case, agreement, complementation, and into phenomena such as Differential Object Marking, the Person Case Constraint, linkers and control.

Non-Canonical Gender Systems

Non-Canonical Gender Systems
Author: Sebastian Fedden
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2018-03-09
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0192514784

This book explores the boundaries of the category of gender and their theoretical significance within the framework of Canonical Typology. Grammatical gender is a famously puzzling category: although it has been widely explored from a typological perspective, studies are constantly identifying exciting and unexpected patterns in gender systems, many of which cannot be easily classified or straightforwardly analysed. Some of these patterns stretch or even threaten to cross the largely unexplored outer boundaries of the category. In the canonical approach, morphosyntactic features like gender are established in terms of a canonical ideal: the clearest instance of the phenomenon. The canonical ideal is a clustering of properties that serves as a baseline to measure the actual examples observed. In this volume, international experts use this approach to analyse a range of gender systems that diverge from the canonical ideal, and to determine to what extent each component property of these systems can be considered canonical. Chapters explore a wide range of typologically diverse languages from all over the world, from South America to Melanesia, and from Central Italy to Northern Australia. The book will be of interest to all linguists working in the field of typology, from graduate level upwards, as well as to morphologists and syntacticians of all theoretical stripes who have an interest in grammatical gender.

The Morphosyntax of Imperatives

The Morphosyntax of Imperatives
Author: Daniela Isac
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2015
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0198733267

This book studies the properties of imperative clauses in the context of a theory of Universal Grammar. Daniela Isac argues that the specificity of imperative clauses cannot be the result of a unique imperative Force feature; instead, the type' of imperative clauses can be traced back to a plurality of finer grained features, such as Modality and phi-features, hosted by the Mod, Infl, and Speech Event heads, among others. The data are drawn from a wide range of languages including various Romance, Slavic, and Germanic languages, as well as Finnish and Inuktitut. The analysis accounts for recurrent patterns in the interaction of imperative mood with phenomena like negation, restrictions on grammatical subjects, and the possibility of embedding imperative clauses. The approach, which focuses exclusively on morphosyntactic rather than semantic features, is potentially transferable to the analysis of other clause types, such as exclamatives, interrogatives, and declaratives.

Mixed Categories

Mixed Categories
Author: Irina Nikolaeva
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 421
Release: 2020
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1108415512

Uses an explicit formal framework to explore and model cross-linguistic variation, in constructions where a noun modifies another noun.