Show Summary Details

Page of

Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Linguistics. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 06 November 2024

Grammatical Gender in the Romance Languageslocked

Grammatical Gender in the Romance Languageslocked

  • Michele LoporcaroMichele LoporcaroUniversity of Zurich

Summary

This article describes the manifestations of the morphosyntactic category of grammatical gender in the Romance languages, including regional varieties and dialects, as well as Romance minority languages spoken under total language contact (which underwent significant reshaping under contact pressure). It will briefly sketch the diachronic development of this category from Latin to the Romance varieties highlighting the diversity that has come into being in Romance as a product of language change and dialect differentiation in this area of grammar. Among this diversity, some phenomena of gender marking and/or assignment have sometimes arisen that are rare among Indo-European languages (and, in some cases, even beyond): these rara & rarissima are paid special attention in the present account of Romance gender.

Subjects

  • Historical Linguistics
  • Morphology
  • Syntax

You do not currently have access to this article

Login

Please login to access the full content.

Subscribe

Access to the full content requires a subscription