Autori
Formentin, Vittorio
Loporcaro, Michele

Titolo
Sul quarto genere grammaticale del romanesco antico
Periodico
Lingua e stile
Anno: 2012 - Fascicolo: 2 - Pagina iniziale: 221 - Pagina finale: 264

On the basis of a exhaustive examination of vernacular texts stretchingfrom 13th to 16th century, in this paper we propose that Old Romanescohad a four-gender system. While the gender agreement targets (articles,adjectives, etc.) only displayed a binary contrast like in modern Italian(e.g. buono, -i 'good.m.sg / -.pl' vs. bona, -e 'good.f.sg / -.pl'), four distinctagreement patterns were selected by four distinct classes of controllers.First of all, in addition to masculine and feminine nouns, there wereneuter nouns, which triggered masculine agreement in the singular andfeminine in the plural. While this third (non-autonomous, i.e. fully syncretic)gender was a development of the Latin neuter, in Old Romanescoa fourth gender arose anew, to which nouns like la nave / li navi 'ship'were assigned, stemming from Latin 3rd declension. These were originallyfeminine, but came to take masculine plural agreement due to the shapeof the nominal ending (-i) and subject to a phonological condition, as thechange affected preferentially shorter (i.e. disyllabic) nouns.



SICI: 0024-385X(2012)2<221:SQGGDR>2.0.ZU;2-7
Testo completo: http://www.mulino.it/download/article/10.1417/38724
Testo completo alternativo: http://www.mulino.it/doi/10.1417/38724

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