Zju wrote:
Porphyrogenitos wrote:- Some varieties of Italian Romance not only preserve a neuter (like Romanian), but some in fact have up to four grammatical genders
- Some varieties of Italian Romance have innovated gender marking on verbs, and some have even developed gender marking on prepositional phrases
How did these innovation happen? Interesting, I thought all contemporary Romance languages only ever have two genders.
Aside from masculine and feminine, there are some Romance languages with a neuter. Romance neuters are due to one of two things:
In Latin, as with many other IE languages, the neuter plural tended to resemble the feminine. When the Latin case system simplified, this mostly did away with the neuter, folding it into the masculine, but there remained a class of neuter nouns whose singular was identical to the masculine and whose plural was identical to the feminine. This class was done away with in the core Western Romance languages (which used -s to mark the plural), but in Italo-Western and Eastern Romance, which used vocalic plurals, this distinction was preserved. This is how we get the Romanian neuter (looks like masculine in the singular, feminine in the plural) and the class of "gender-changing plurals" in Italian, as well as other classes of neuter nouns with more or less identical behavior in some other Italian Romance varieties.
The other way is essentially an innovation. Firstly - the original masculine singular ending in Romance was actually /u/, not /o/. While short /u/ merged into /o/ in all other cases, the final /m/ of the masculine accusative singular prevented it from lowering. Only later on, in some languages, did the final masculine singular /u/ lower to /o/. Secondly - if you're familiar with the Spanish article
lo, used to refer to categories and abstractions, as well as an impersonal pronoun, e.g.
lo interesante "the interesting [thing about it]" or
lo que es... "that which is..." - Imagine if that one word gave rise to a whole gender. That's what this other Romance neuter is. The article lo is descended from the Latin neuter demonstrative
illud, whose final short /u/
did lower to /o/, as one would expect. So, the languages with this kind of neuter are Asturian and Neapolitan + some other Italian Romance varieties.
In Asturian, as far as I can tell, what must have happened is that words to which
illud/
lo was preposed took the ending -o out of analogy with it, as opposed to the regular masculine singular ending in Asturian, which is the unlowered /u/ discussed above. This allowed distinctions like
el guapu "the handsome one"vs.
lo guapo "the interesting thing [about it]" and el pelu "the [individual] hair" vs. lo pelo "the hair [as a material or substance]".
The
illud neuter in Neapolitan and some other Italian Romance varieties carries essentially the same semantic distinction, but phonologically the distinction is maintained not through final vowels - final /u/ was lowered to /o/ in Neapolitan - but through consonant mutation (i.e. syntactic gemination, as found in Standard Italian and other Italian varieties). The final -d of
illud triggered gemination of the succeeding consonant historically, resulting in distinctions like
’o pane "the [particular variety of] bread" vs.
’o ppane "the bread [as a substance or collective mass]" and
’o napulitano "the Neapolitan man" vs.
’o nnapulitano "the Neapolitan language".
Romance languages with four grammatical genders - of which there are a few scattered about the southern part of Italy, apparently - have both of these kinds of neuters.
Or, alternatively, they have the "gender-changing plural" neuter - but also innovated a second gender-changing neuter that looks like the feminine in the singular and the masculine in the plural.
Dewrad wrote:
I've had a look through Ledgeway and Maiden and I can't immediately find a reference to gender marking on verbs- could we get a page reference on that? Not disbelieving (the Romance family is unfairly scorned by conlangers: there's a hell of a lot of weird that happens), I just can't find the reference!
In Chapter 57: Gender, 934-935
Introducing gender agreement targets in §57.1, I specified that these do not usually include finite verb forms. In Mozarabic, though, loss of auxiliaries through replication of the Semitic model resulted in gender-agreeing past tense verb forms: e.g. MI-O sidÉLLO BEN-ID <mw sdylh bnyd> ‘my (p.935) Cidiello came.MSG’ (H 5, Corriente 1997:309-11). The same happens in acquisitional varieties of Italian before the auxiliaries emerge (Loporcaro 1998b:220-24).
Several Italo-Romance dialects have acquired gender marking on finite verbs, often limited to one paradigm cell of just one lexeme—‘have’ in some dialects on the Emilian Apennine, e.g. leː l ɛː vest/lo l a vest ‘she has.F/he has.M seen’ in Grizzanese (Loporcaro 1996), ‘be’ in several dialects of Trentino, e.g. l ɛi̯ bɛːla/l ɛ bɛːl ‘she is.F/he is.M beautiful’ (Loporcaro and Vigolo 2002-3), as well as in Friulian—or all verbs, as in Mesocco, Canton Grigioni, where all and only third person plural forms of all verbs agree in gender with their subject (Salvioni 1902:139): la dizen/i diz ‘they say.F/M’.
The most spectacular system in this respect is that of southern Marchigiano dialects spoken between the Tronto and Aso rivers. In Ripatransone (Parrino 1967; Harder 1988), finite verbs agree in gender with their subject: esse veðe ‘she sees.F’/issu veðu ‘he sees.M’/sə veðə kə ‘one sees.N that’. Also other constituents may agree in gender/number with the subject: ʧ ajju sɔnna/-u ‘I am sleepy.M’ vs ʧ ajje sɔnne/**-u ‘I am sleepy.F’ (lit. ‘(I.M) have.M sleepiness.M’ vs ‘(I.F) have.F sleepiness.F’). This concerns even subcategorized prepositional phrases: