Four-gender systems in Indo-European
- 1 January 2011
- journal article
- Published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH in Folia Linguistica
- Vol. 45 (2)
- https://doi.org/10.1515/flin.2011.015
Abstract
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 transitionKeywords
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