Loporcaro - Gender From Latin To Romance

OXFORD GENDER FROM LATIN TO ROMANCE MICHELE LOPORCAROGender from Latin to RomanceOXFORD STUDIES IN DIACHRONIC AND HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS GENERAL EDITORS: Adam Ledgeway and Ian Roberts, University of Cambridge ADVISORY EDITORS: Cynthia Allen, Australian National University; Ricardo Bermudez-Otero, University of Manchester, ‘Theresa Biberauer, University of Cambridge; Charlotte Galves, University of Campinas; Geoft Horrocks, University of Cambridge; Paul Kiparsky, Stanford University; Anthony Kroch, University of Pennsylvania; David Lightfoot, Georgetown Universitys Giuseppe Longobardi, University of York; George Walkden, University of Konstanz; David Willis, University of Cambridge RECENTLY PUBLISHED IN THE SERIES 20 Grammaticalization and the Rise of Configurationality in Indo-Aryan Uta Reindhl a ‘The Rise and Fall of Ergativity in Aramaic Gyles of Alignment Change Eleanor Coghill 2 Portuguese Relative Clauses in Synchrony and Diachrony Adriana Cardoso 23 ‘Micro-change and Macro-change in Diachronic Syntax Edited by Eric Mathieu and Robert Truswell 24 ‘The Development of Latin Clause Structure A Study of the Extended Verb Phrase Lieven Danckaert 25 Transitive Nouns and Adjectives Evidence from Early Indo-Aryan John. J. Lowe 26 Quantitative Historical Linguistics A Corpus Framework Gard B, Jenset and Barbara McGillivray 27 Gender from Latin to Romance History, Geography, Typology Michele Loporcaro For a complete list of titles published and in preparation for the series, see pp. 387-90Gender from Latin to Romance History, Geography, Typology MICHELE LOPORCARO OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS © Michele Loporcaro 2018. First published 2018 by Oxford University PressOXFORD ‘UNIVERSITY PRESS Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 68, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of ‘Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Michele Loporcaro 2018 ‘The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2018 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. 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Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.per Laura e Lorenzo (anche se lui non lo sa pitt), e per Chiara, volata via mentre finivo di scrivereContents Series preface Preface List of maps Abbreviations and notational conventions Abbreviations used for Latin authors and their works 1 Introduction 1.1 The many facets of ‘gender’ 1.2 The method and the basic facts 13 Synchrony and diachrony of Romance gender systems: the basic issues 1.4 Outline of the book 2 The starting point: Gender in Latin 2a The three genders of Latin 2.2 The Latin neuter and its functions 2.2.1 Resumption/pronominalization of non-canonical controllers 2.2.2 Gender resolution 2.3 Gender values and gender assignment from (Proto-)Indo-European to Latin 2.4 Latin/Romance gender in typological perspective 3 Grammatical gender in Romance: The mainstream 3.1 Binary gender systems 3.1.1 The majority type: parallel binary gender systems 3.1.2 Binary convergent systems 3.13. From parallel to convergent and back to a parallel gender system 3.2. Gender assignment rules 3.2.1 Semantic rules 3.2.2 Formal rules 4 Romance gender systems: The fuller picture 4.1 The data from Romance morphosyntactic variation across time and space 4.2 ‘Remnants of the neuter’: a loose label 4.2.1 Pronoun and adjective inflection 4.2.2 Noun inflection 4.2.3. Lexicalization 43 A closer look at two-gender systems 4.3.2 Gender-overdifferentiated agreement targets in Romansh xi xiii xix xxiii 2 4 16 16 22 22 24 26 30 33 33 34 40 46 52 52 56 62 62 63 64 65 67 70 70 7viii Contents 4.3.3, Neuter agreement targets and default in Romansh 4.3.4 Neuter pronouns and default across Romance 4.35 Alternating gender agreement in modern Standard Italian 43.6 The fading of the alternating gender in Northern Italo-Romance 4.4 Three-gender systems 4-4. Three controller genders in Romanian ‘Two or three genders? 2 Gender agreement targets in Romanian 3 (Overt) gender and noun inflectional classes 1.4 ‘Gender’ and ‘class’ in a two-gender analysis of Romanian. 1.5. The evidence from gender resolution (and then morphology, again) 4.4.1.6 Conclusion: the productivity of the Romanian neuter 4.4.2 Further systems with three controller genders 4.4.3. Three target genders in present-day Romance 4.5 Four-gender systems 45a Campania, Northern Puglia, North-Eastern Lucania, Abruzzo 4.5.2 Central Italy (Lazio, Umbria, Marche) 4.5.3. The feminine husbands of Agnonese, or the conventionalization of the alternating neuter 4.5.4 Mass/countness in the gender system: central-southern Italo-Romance 4.6 Concluding remarks: the variety of Romance gender systems 5 Mass/countness and gender in Asturian 5.1 Central Asturian: the basic facts 5.2. The Asturian neuter: analyses so far 5.3. The problem with the Asturian neuter 5.4 A novel proposal: the ‘second gender’ feature of Asturian 5.41 Asturian in a typological perspective 5.4.2. Gender assignment in a language with concurrent systems 5.4.3 Simple syntactic rules for gender/number agreement in Asturian 5.5 On the way to and past the Central Asturian system 5.6 Concluding remarks 6 The older stages of the Romance languages 6.1 Old Romanian 6.2 Old Italian 6.3 Medieval Western Romance 632 Old Gallo-Romance 6.3.2 Old Northern Italo-Romance 6.4 Old Romansh 6.5 Older stages of Central-Southern Italo-Romance 76 79 81 87 92 92 92 93 94 100 104 109 0 113 16 ng 132 140 145, 155 160 160 163 164 12 173, 180 183 192 194 195 195 197 203 203 208 210 212Contents ix 6.6 Concluding remarks: complementing dialect comparison with the medieval evidence 218 7 Gender from Latin to Romance: A reconstruction 219 74 Grammatical gender in transition: a-plural agreement and the masculine vs neuter contrast 220 7.2 The rise of the genus alternans 225 73 The gradual depletion of the Latin neuter 230 74 Rise and fall of the early Romance four-gender system 236 7.41 The rise of the four-gender system 239 7.4.2. Marking the N vs M contrast: geolinguistic evidence for reconstruction 241 7.4.3 The fading of the four-gender system 245 7.4.3.1 The fading of the alternating neuter 245 7.43.2. The fading of the mass neuter 247 74.4 Neurolinguistic evidence for impending change in the gender system 253 75 Continuity vs discontinuity in the Latin-Romance neuter(s): Asturian again 256 7.6 ‘The desemanticization of grammatical gender 264 7.7 The (re)semanticization of grammatical gender 265 78 The rise of new gender values: or, masculine wives and sisters in southern Italy 269 79 Romance dialects with five gender values? 277 710 Concluding remarks: the diachrony of Latin-Romance gender 282 8 The typological interest of lesser-known Romance gender systems 284 8.1 Romance four-gender systems from a typological perspective 284 8.2. Strictly semantic gender values and semantic subgenders in Romance 288 8.3. Contact-induced change in the gender system 291 8.3.1 Contact-induced change in Daco-Romance 292 8.3.2 Contact-induced change in Northern Sardinian 295 8.3.3 Romance gender and its impact on contact languages 300 8.4 Unusual conditions on gender/number agreement 302 8.5 Gender agreement on unusual targets 308, 8.6 Syntactically-dependent overt gender marking 3u 87 Concurrent gender systems in Romance 33 8.8 Concluding remarks: enriching the WALS with Romance data 314 Bibliography 317 Index of languages 365 Index of names 372 Index of subjects 381Series preface Modern diachronic linguistics has important contacts with other subdisciplines, notably first-language acquisition, learnability theory, computational linguistics, socio- linguistics and the traditional philological study of texts. It is now recognized in the wider field that diachronic linguistics can make a novel contribution to linguistic theory, to historical linguistics and arguably to cognitive science more widely. This series provides a forum for work in both diachronic and historical linguistics, including work on change in grammar, sound, and meaning within and across languages; synchronic studies of languages in the past; and descriptive histories of one or more languages. It is intended to reflect and encourage the links between these subjects and fields such as those mentioned above. The goal of the series is to publish high-quality monographs and collections of papers in diachronic linguistics generally, i.e. studies focusing on change in linguistic structure, and/or change in grammars, which are also intended to make a contribution to linguistic theory, by developing and adopting a current theoretical model, by raising wider questions concerning the nature of language change or by developing theoretical connections with other areas of linguistics and cognitive science as listed above. There is no bias towards a particular language or language family, or towards a particular theoretical framework; work in all theoretical frameworks, and work based on the descriptive tradition of language typology, as well as quantitatively based work using theoretical ideas, also feature in the series. Adam Ledgeway and Ian Roberts University of CambridgePreface ‘This monograph illustrates how grammatical gender developed out of Latin, giving rise to a host of grammatical systems in the Romance languages and dialects, diverging remarkably across time and space. As the readers close the book, they will hopefully have been persuaded by some of the analyses presented in its pages. Yet, more open questions than certainties will probably stay with them, which is due to the fact that, in spite of the Latin-Romance continuum being a much investigated domain—with few, if any, parallels among the languages of the world—our knowledge of many important pieces of the puzzle is still fragmentary. Even if not providing all the answers, this book is meant to at least contribute to focusing on the right questions in this area. The answers and questions addressed in this book will concern, as the title announces, grammatical gender in Romance and its development over time. This dictates the main angle of approach to the data to be considered in what follows, viz. the diachronic perspective. I shall put forward a reconstruction of how the gender systems of the Romance languages and dialects came to look as they do nowadays. This will be a unitary account, within which all language-specific developments will find their place, thus departing from what is often found in the literature, which usually treats each system in isolation. Take Romanian, the only modern standard Romance language for which a three-gender analysis is currently proposed, assuming a contrast between masculine, feminine, and neuter. Now, some have claimed that the Romanian neuter is not a successor of the Latin neuter, but rather a Romance innovation, possibly under the influence of Slavic and/or Albanian. Similar claims to discontinuity with respect to the Latin neuter have been put forward for the neuter gender which appears in several descriptions of other Romance varieties (e.g. Sursilvan, and several central-southern Italo-Romance dialects). Of course, similar diachronic ups and downs—reduction of a three-way gender system to a binary one at stage f,, and the reintroduction of a third gender value at time f,, —are possible in principle, just as it is too that language contact may shape change, in this province of grammar as elsewhere. However, in this specific case, I will argue that Romance comparison provides decisive evidence against this view: both the Romanian neuter and the—quite distinct—gender value that is termed ‘neuter’ in the other Romance varieties just mentioned, are explained most economically as outcomes of the Latin neuter. This answers the basic question to be asked in a book about the development of gender from Latin to Romance, that is, ‘What happened to the Latin neuter?’. The issue is not nominal- istic: thus, the so called ‘Asturian neuter’, while inheriting—as elsewhere in Romance— part of its agreement targets from Latin, will turn out to be a full innovation qua inherent specification of noun lexemes. The subtitle of the book—“‘history, geography, typology’—links the historical dimension with synchronic variation across space and across conceivable structural options. As already hinted at, the comparative perspective will be instrumental in shaping thexiv Preface account of the diachrony of Romance gender to be developed here. Yet fine-grained comparison, as the book proceeds, will emerge as an interesting goal per se: the structural diversity which Romance variation holds in store in this field will prove to have been grossly underestimated so far. Thus, one additional purpose of this book is to present the reader not specializing in Romance with, at least, the most striking of Romance gender systems, which turn out to occur in lesser known local dialects: variation on the geographical dimension, then, will be given crucial attention in what follows. Much of the typologically interesting data from Romance dialects are from first- hand fieldwork on Italo-Romance (this is the case whenever dialect data are unrefer- enced). While there is an abundant body of literature on the relevant structural aspects of these varieties, this literature, known to dialectologists, is underexploited in linguistic-typological studies of gender, and, on the other hand—as will become apparent in what follows—it barely answers all the questions asked by current typological research on gender: this opens up a space for further research but with an urgent timing issue. The locus of most of the structural richness analysed in this book is the heavily endangered languages which we call ‘Romance dialects’. Thus, the book also implicitly reads as a manifesto on the loss of valuable sources (not only, quite trivially, for synchronic language typologizing but also for diachronic reconstruction) determined by language endangerment and death. In sum, even if the book primarily targets Romance scholars, its focus on structural diversity and ‘exotic’ gender systems at the heart of Europe is meant to appeal to language typologists. It should be of interest to them to come across typological raris- sima such as systems where nouns are at once not only controllers but also targets of gender/number agreement, acquiring contextual gender marking via agreement with the clause subject. An additional interest might be the only case described so far, in Romance and throughout Europe, of a language with two concurrent gender systems—a phenomenon previously only described for sparse languages of the Americas, Australia, or Papua New Guinea. This book will also discuss the first instance known—to me, at least—of a language where overt gender may depend on syntactic context. At the same time, the diachronic account of changes in the gender system— addressing issues such as the rise of typological rara of the kind just mentioned, the loss or increase of gender values over time, the role of ‘inquorate’ genders in transitional stages, and the impact of language contact on change in the gender systems (especially concerning the issue of whether this necessarily must lead to simplification)—is meant to interest not only specialists in Romance, but everyone specializing in historical linguistics and language change. As for synchronic analysis, the book assumes the treatment of grammatical gender that G. G. Corbett has established as a standard over the past three decades: while its focus is not theoretical, the theory of Canonical Typology becomes crucial when it comes to diagnosing the existence of concurrent gender systems. The structure of the monograph is outlined in the final section of Chapter 1. Let me add some practical remarks. Cross-references point by default to numbered examples or footnotes within the same chapter, unless another chapter/section is specified. Linguistic data are provided in traditional orthography for standard languages, whilePreface xv IPA transcriptions—somewhat simplified, given that the focus is not on the phonet- ics—are provided for (non-standardized) Romance dialect data gathered through fieldwork. Again, given the non-phonetic focus of the book, dialect data quoted from other sources (except for AIS and ALI) are not adapted to IPA. Latin forms are reported following different conventions, depending on whether they are cited per se or as the diachronic source to their Romance descendants: in the latter case, they are given in small capitals as customary in Romance linguistics, for nouns and adjectives in the accusative form (e.g. VILLAM, BONUM), which ultimately became generalized (with the exception of oblique functions in Romanian); if considered per se, rather than from a Romance angle, Latin words, phrases, and sentences are reported in italics (e.g. uillam), or in italicized small capitals when stemming from inscriptions (e.g. sorores). In glossing, Leipzig-style abbreviations are applied in numbered examples. While glossing single expressions within the main text flow, I take some liberties to avoid redundancy: for instance, I occasionally conflate literal and semantic glosses, as in /-a virti ‘the-r.sG virtue’ (instead of DEF-F.sG virtue(F) followed by the translation ‘the virtue’). ‘My gratitude goes to a number of persons and institutions. First and foremost, Grev Corbett, without whose work on gender this book would not stand as it is today, and Vittorio Formentin, whose study of Old Neapolitan persuaded me, years ago, that the whole story was worth retelling. Many other friends and colleagues exchanged views and assisted me with comments and suggestions on many aspects of the present research: Alvaro Arias, Valentina Bambini, Marcello Barbato, Pier Marco Bertinetto, Cristina Bleortu, Walter Breu, Ana M. Cano Gonzalez, Chiara Cappellaro, Rosaria Carosella, Claudio Ciociola, Ramén de Andrés, Alessandro De Angelis, Hans-Olav Enger, Vincenzo Faraoni, Sebastian Fedden, Inés Fernandez-Ordoiez, Jiirg Fleischer, Xosé Lluis Garcia Arias, Francesco Gardani, Marco Maggiore, Martin Maiden, Giovanni Manzari, Tania Paciaroni, Diego Pescarini, Orla Ralph, Davide Ricca, Giuseppina Silvestri, Fredy Suter, Anna Thornton, Lorenzo Tomasin, Fiorenzo Toso, Carlotta Viti, and Egbert Wilms. In no way, of course, may they be held responsible for any views upheld here (although with some of them I have co-published on the topic), a disclaimer which also holds for three anonymous OUP reviewers who took time to analyse the project, providing constructive criticism. To the editors of the Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages, Adam Ledgeway and Martin Maiden, I owe gratitude for discussing with me the chapter on gender I was invited to contribute to that work: its 8,000 words were a crucial step along the path which led this research up to a book-length result. Alberto Giudici and Luca Pesini helped me with the preparation of the manuscript, the maps, and the indexes. The OUP linguistics editors Julia Steer and Vicki Sunter, as well as the whole OUP staff, must be credited for their competent support and patience. At OUP, John Davey was first to believe in the project, and it is sad to know he will not see it finished. * Stress is marked (as V) only on palatal consonants are transcribed paroxytonic words, geminates are noted [CC] instead of [C:], and El instead of [f 3 tf 43]xvi__ Preface L also gratefully acknowledge the feedback received, over recent years, from the audiences to whom I had the opportunity to present parts of this research:? guest professorships at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (2010, 2014, 2017),° the University of Oviedo (2017), and the Summer School of the Societa Italiana di Glottologia (Lignano/Udine, 2014) helped to advance the project, as did being invited to speak at the 33rd annual conference of the Societa Italiana di Glottologia (Palermo, 2008), at the workshop ‘Agreement from a diachronic perspective’ (Marburg, 2012), and at CIDSM X (Leiden, 2015). Presenting the project at the Fellow colloquium at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2014) confronted me with the hard challenge of packaging the subject matter so that it could be of interest for non-linguists, in an interdisciplinary context. The class lectures on gender I gave in the autumn terms 2010 and 2014 at my university gave me a further opportunity to fine-tune the presentation of this intricate topic, also to the benefit of neophytes in the field. From the audiences of those class lectures came some of the students who cooperated, over the years, in the enterprise and enriched the corpus of our knowledge on Romance grammatical gender by writing seminar papers or MA theses on the topic: Federica Breimaier, Maria Caligiuri, Miriam Dettli, Miriam Di Carlo, Sylvina Kampf, Monica Marotta, Graziella Nolé, Anna Pace, Dafne Pedrazzoli, Adriano Rezzonico, Mario Wild. Thanks are also due to Dumitru Kihai, Ramon de Andrés, Daniela Duca, Maria Ana Gassman, Adilia Gomes, Brindusa Hantar, Itziar Lépez Guil, Gabriela Varia, and many other friends and colleagues who shared with me their native intuitions on their respective languages. A number of other friends did the same for lesser-known non-standard dialects (and in many of the places listed, many more helped me with their experti whom I cannot mention individually here): Domenico Meo, Ester Cavarozzi, Stefania ‘Appugliese (Agnone), Lucia Loporcaro, Lillina Ventricelli, Vincenzo Ventricelli (Altamura), Rina Depperu (Calangianus), Luigi Seralessandri, Pierino Santini (Canepina), Antea Mattei (Comano), Floriana Carrino (Frosolone), Francesco and Angela Leone (Gravina di Puglia), Silvano and Kristina Karlovi¢ (Jesenovik), Toni Vinzens (Laax), Piero Depperu (Luras), Pierangelo Carlucci (Miglionico), Antonio Palumbo (Mola di Bari), Arno Lamprecht and Giancarlo Conrad (Miistair), Tonino Romano (Parabita), Lina Manattini and Saverio Piacentini (Piandelagotti), Silvano Poeta (Poggio San Romualdo), Tommaso De Russis (Polignano a Mare), Luigino Cardarelli and Alfredo Rossi (Ripatransone), Giacomo Orlandi (Roiate), Biagio Mele 2 ‘These opportunities include presentations at a number of conferences and/or colloquia: the triennial conferences of the Société de Linguistique et Philologie Romanes (Innsbruck, 2007; Valencia, 2010; Nancy, 2013; Rome, 2016), two editions of the Cambridge Italian Dialect Syntax Meetings (Pescara, 2008; Cambridge, 2013; Leiden, 2015), the 19th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (Nijmegen, 2009), the 28th Xornaes Internacionales D'Estudiu dell Academia de la Llingua Asturiana (Oviedo, 2009), the 3rd Transalpine Typology Meeting (Zurich, 2013), the 13th conference of the Societa Internazionale di Linguistica e Filologia Italiana (Palermo, 2014), the workshops ‘Non-Standard Average European’ (Freiburg in Breisgau, 2012), ‘Mass and count in Romance and Germanic languages’ (Zurich, 2013), ‘Lingue delle ‘sole, isole linguistiche’ (Corte, 2014), as well as talks given at the Universities of Chieti and Roma La Sapienza (2010), the Wissenschafiskolleg 2u Berlin (2014), the Max-Planck-Institut fiir evolutionire Anthropologie in Leipzig (2014), the Scuola Superiore di Studi Avanzati Sapienza (Rome, 2014). + While giving those classes, received feedback from many younger colleagues: among them, Francesco Giancane, Laura Ingallinella, Stanislao Zompi, and Emanuele Saiu, whom I thank.Preface xvii (San Giovanni in Fiore), Angelo Magliona and Tonino Rubattu (Sénnori), Lucia Di lorio (Spinete), Boris Bako and Pep Glavina (Suénjevica), Antonio Venezia (Tolve), Carli Tomaschett (Trun), Giuseppe Petroselli (Viterbo), Lugjano and Julijana Turkovié (Zejane), Anna Staschia Bott (Zuoz). Beyond Romance, thanks are due to Hari Sridhar (Tamil) and Fely Glorioso (Tagalog). The Stiftung for Wissenschaftliche Forschung of the University of Zurich funded the neurolinguistic research whose preliminary results are reported in Chapter 7, run at the lab of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. The Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Zurich partly funded fieldwork in northern Sardinia (2003, 2016), Emilia (2008), central-northern Corsica (2012), Puglia (2015), and Molise (2007, 2013), during which I collected data on grammatical gender that is utilized in what follows. Focusing on variation in gender assignment and gender agreement marking in the Romance-speaking areas, this book contributes to research in the framework of the UZH Research Priority Programme ‘Language and Space’, which, in cooperation with the project ‘Linguistic morphology in Time and Space’ (LiMiTS, Swiss National Science Foundation CRSII1_160739/1) funded fieldwork on Istro-Romanian (2017). It is also part of the research output of—and benefited from fieldwork funding from—the project ‘The Zurich Database of Agreement in Italo-Romance’ (Swiss National Science Foundation 100012-156530). Thanks are due, last but not least, to the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, which freely granted me a fellowship during the academic year 2013-14, and hosted me in a stimu- lating and thought-inspiring setting, where the book began to take shape, far away from everyday administrative commitments. The amazingly efficient Library services at WiKo were instrumental in providing food for thought, not only about Romance languages (for which I have been able to use, over the past two decades, the worldwide unrivalled libraries at the UZH, still excellent today in spite of the authorities who strive to dismantle them) but also on, say, Tamil or Wolof, which helped me to explore the Latin/Romance data from a new perspective. Berlin, January 2017List of maps ‘Map 1 Romance gender systems ‘Map 2 Binary (M/r) convergent gender systems ‘Map 3 ‘The area of the mass neuter and the Neapolitan-type four-gender system in central-southern Italy ‘Map 4 Marking of the neuter (1s) vs masculine (m) contrast on the indefinite article ‘Map 5 ‘The subdivision of Asturian (after Garcia Arias 2003b: 499) ‘Map 6 Different ways of marking the mt (masculine) vs w (mass neuter) contrast, Map 7 More than binary gender systems in central-southern Italy ‘Map 8 Istro-Romanian ‘Map 9 Convergent binary system and contact-induced change in northern Sardinia 60 a 156 159 194 244 278 293, 296Abbreviations and notational conventions Grammatical abbreviations are listed here only if not included in the Leipzig Glossing Rules (http://wwweva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php). Bibliographical abbreviations are included in the final reference list. A adjective a alternating (gender)! AN animate ATT attributive Cat, Catalan cL Classical Latin D determiner Do direct object e early E English Eng. Engadinian Fr. French Fr-Pr. Franco-Provencalll Germ. Germanic Gk. Greek Hung. Hungarian Ic inflectional class IE Indo-European impr imperfect (tense) INAN inanimate Ind. Indian 10 indirect object Pg. Indo-Portuguese IstRo. Istro-Romanian It Italian Lat. Latin LEng. Lower Engadinian lit literally Log. Logudorese (Sardinian) MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historicaxxii Abbreviations and notational conventions MSRo. modern standard Romanian N northern (in abbreviations like NItRom = Northern Italo-Romance) N noun NONF not feminine (i.e. masculine/neuter, underspecified) NONM not masculine (ie. feminine/neuter, underspecified) NP noun phrase o- Old (as in OInd., ORo. ete.) Oce. Occitan PERS person marker (in front of person-denoting names/nouns in Tagalog) Pg. Portuguese PIE Proto-Indo-European PRom Proto-Romance pre past participle RE Raddoppiamento Fonosintattico Ro. Romanian s southern Sa. Sardinian SCL subject clitic SL Slavie Sp. Spanish Sts. Sursilvan sult. Standard Italian UEng. Upper Engadinian - becomes (by synchronic derivation) + derives from (synchronically) > becomes (diachronically) < derives from (diachronically) * reconstructed form o ‘ungrammatical form/phrase (x) the clause becomes ungrammatical if xis omitted (x) the clause becomes ungrammatical if x is realized (x) the clause is ungrammatical, both with and without x * grammatical for some speakers only of dubious grammaticality pragmatically oddAbbreviations used for Latin authors and their works Aen. Agr Ann, ANTON. PLAC. Cakt. AUREL. Cars. Carm. Cato Chron. Cre. Cist. Commopian. Cur, Dig. ENwtus Ep. Fin, Franc, Chron, Fred. Get. Gram, GreG.Tur. Hieron. Hist. Hor. Inst. Isp. Vergilius, Aeneis Cato, De agri cultura Ennius, Annales Antoninus Placentinus Commodianus, Carmen apologeticum Lucius Apuleius Plautus, Asinaria Plautus, Bacchides Caesar, De bello civili Caelius Aurelianus Gaius Iulius Caesar Commodianus, Carmina; Quintus Horatius Flaccus, Carmina ‘Marcus Porcius Cato (the Elder) Caelius Aurelianus, De morbis acutis et chronicis Marcus Tullius Cicero Plautus, Cistellaria Commodianus Plautus, Curculio Sextus Pomponius, Digestum Quintus Ennius Pliny (the Younger), Epistulae Cicero, De finibus bonorum et malorum Gregorius Turonensis, Historia Francorum Chronicae q. d. Fredegarii scholastici Aulus Gellius Grammaticae Romanae fragmenta, edn. Funaioli (1907) Gregorius Turonensis, Georgius Florentinus Gregorius, bishop of Tours Sophronius Eusebius Hieronymus Tacitus, Historiae Quintus Horatius Flaccus Quintilianus, Institutio oratoria Isidorus Hispalensis (= Isidore of Seville)xxiv Abbreviations used for Latin authors and their works Itin. Liv. Lucr. Men. Met. Mil. Most. NA. NH. Non. Off Orat. Orig. PETR. PHAEDR. Philippica PL. PLIN. Pompon. Ps. Quint, Rust. Scaen. Serm. St. Tac. Tusc. ‘VARRO ‘VERG. Vetus Latina Iinerarium Antonini Placentini Titus Livius Lucretius, De rerum natura Varro, Saturae Menippeae Apuleius, Metamorphoses Plautus, Miles Gloriosus Plautus, Mostellaria Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae Pliny (the Elder), Naturalis Historia Nonius Marcellus Cicero, De officiis Cato, Orationum reliquiae Isidorus, Origines sive etymologiae Petronius Gaius Iulius Phaedrus Cicero, Philippica Titus Maccius Plautus Pliny (the Elder), Pliny (the Younger) (see N.H. vs Ep. respectively) Sextus Pomponius Psalmi (Book of Psalms) Marcus Fabius Quintilianus Varro, Res rusticae Ennius, Scaenica Augustine, Sermones Plautus, Stichus Publius Cornelius Tacitus Cicero, Tusculanae disputationes Marcus Terentius Varro Publius Vergilius Maro Vetus Latina or Itala, the oldest Latin translation of the BibleIntroduction 1.1 The many facets of ‘gender’ Gender is a popular notion in many respects. If one linguistic category has attracted interest in the broader context of the human and social sciences over the past few decades, this is gender, to the extent that nowadays, even in highly technical papers in linguistics, it is not unusual to come across preliminary clarifications such as the following: ‘The concept of gender has three faces. Natural gender (N-gender, or sex), Social gender (S-gender), which reflects the social implications of being a man or a woman (or perhaps something in between), and Linguistic gender (L-gender). L-gender tends to mirror social and cul- tural stereotypes of S-gender (Aikhenvald 2012: 33) ‘The very fact that a linguistic typologist writing on gender today feels compelled to clarify at the outset that gender is a linguistic notion,” is a sign of the social impact of ‘gender studies’, which led to an incipient resemanticization of the term gender itself, or at least to a shifted relative prominence of its different readings (which is why, at this initial point in the book, ‘gender’ appears in quotation marks).” English diction- aries until some decades ago would start the entry ‘gender’ with definition 1 (on L-gender), and go on to mention, for example as definition 3 in the OED, ‘Males or females viewed as a group’, whereas the reverse order seems more popular nowadays (see eg. the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English)? Needless to say, it is L-gender (or grammatical gender) which is in focus in this book. However, even remaining within the province of linguistic studies, S-gender is omnipresent.‘ Consider for example the way an often-quoted French reference grammar discusses the gender of mer ‘sea’ * More recently, Aikhenvald (2016) develops this discussion on ‘the multi-faceted notion of gender’ into a book-length monograph. 2 In linguistics, to quote just one example, this impact is eloquently shown by the republishing of R. Lakoff’s (1975) influential book, with an introduction and extensive commentaries by Bucholtz (Lakoff 2004). > In one sense, thus, it is true that the use of gender in gender studies is an extension of ‘the grammatical label “gender” [...] replacing “sex” (Dixon 2010: 155). See Widerberg (1998: 134) for the recognition, from within gender studies, that gender was ‘previously a concept used primarily in grammatical [...] contexts. (On the other hand, in the European tradition the original semantics of ‘lass’ (in any taxonomy), inherited from Lat. genus/Gk. génos, has always persisted in the background, favouring the revival ofa broader reading. * The ambiguity is often played on deliberately, as is the case e.g. in Vasvari’s (2015) title, as well as in ‘most contributions to Hellinger and Motschenbacher (2015). Gender from Latin to Romance. First edition. Michele Loporcaro © Michele Loporcaro 2018. First published 2018 by Oxford University Press2 Introduction mer (...] est passé au féminin dans notre langue, alors qu’il demeurait masculin dans d'autres langues romanes. Et il sembre difficile dexpliquer cette modification autrement que par des besoins métaphoriques conformes a esprit national, la mer ayant été congue par nos ancétres, de méme que par nous, comme quelque chose de féminin, La mer est d'aspect changeant comme une femme, journaliére, d’humeur mobile comme une jolie capricieuse, attirante et dangereuse comme une beauté perfide. Le citadin qui lui consacre ses vacances est amoureux delle; elle est Pamante et la meurtriére du marin, (Damourette and Pichon 1911-27: 1.371) [(the word) mer ‘sea’ has become feminine in our language, whereas it stayed masculine in other Romance languages. And it seems hard to explain this modification otherwise than through metaphoric needs suiting the national spirit, the sea having been conceived by our ancestors, as well as by ourselves, as something feminine. The sea is of variable appearance, like a woman, whimsical, of mutable mood like a capricious charmer, alluring and dangerous like a perfidious beauty. The city-dweller who devotes his vacations to it/her is in love with it/her; it/ she is the murderous lover of the mariner.] Here is a blatant manifestation of (S-)gender bias: the ‘spirit of the people’ is equated with a (chauvinist) men’s view on the world, flatly neglecting the contribution to linguistic interaction (and the shaping of linguistic meaning and form within one specific linguistic community) by the other half of the population, definitely a telling example of how even reference works are not immune from such nonsense. Note that such pseudo-explanations are not only preposterous from an S-gender perspective (such that they have been rightly criticized in the feminist-linguistics literature, see Yaguello 1989: 114), but are idle also in purely linguistic terms: (male) tourists and mariners exist in Italy as well, yet It. mare is masculine. The same degree of arbitrari- ness is found in other kinds of ad hoc referential explanation, such as those appealing to the influence of other nouns: ‘fem. nach terra’ [feminine on the model of terra’] (Voretzsch and Rohlfs 1955: 287); ‘Einflu8 von terra oder von aqua?’ [‘influence of terra or of aqua?’] (Stotz 1998: 155), terra ‘earth’ and aqua ‘water’ being feminine in Latin. However, the same (alleged) cause was there in Italian as well, without this resulting in a change to feminine, unlike Mare (N) > Fr. mer (r). Conversely, the same change happened in Romanian Ro. mare (r), though Lat. TERRA was ousted, in the meaning ‘earth’, by PAVIMENTUM (N) > Ro. pamdnt (‘) (while apd ‘water (F)’ was preserved). More appropriately, in recent work on the topic in diachronic morphology, the issue is tackled from the point of view of the relationship between gender and inflectional class, that is, from an autonomously linguistic perspective: ‘The role of inflectional cues in determining the maintenance of gender can be appreciated from the negative perspective of those instances where neither semantic function nor form assists speakers. Third declension inanimate nouns offer neither inflectional nor semantic cues, and their development is correspondingly sometimes erratic, with genders varying from region to region (Maiden 20n:: 169). Gender change in MaRE belongs in this picture: it is an old phenomenon (see e.g. int qua mare ‘in which.aBL.F.sG sea(F).ABL.SG’, in the late sixth century Itinerarium Antonini Placentini (ANTON. PLAC., Itin. Rec. A 10, p. 166.7; TALL 8.377.76f.) and correspondingly has wide-ranging consequences in Romance, as shown by feminine gender in Ro. mare, OSp., OPg., Cat. mar.11 The many facets of gender’ 3 ‘The linguistic-typology literature has now set standards which are incompatible with (and protect its practitioners from) the nonsense exemplified above with the tale of the mariners—or the (male) tourists—and the (feminized) sea. This book will capitalize on this research tradition and, while not directly concerned with gender in the gender-studies sense (S-gender), it has a general contribution to make to gender studies, which focus quite centrally on the linguistic manifestations of grammatical gender.> ‘This is only natural, since gender, like any other linguistic category, may serve to cat- egorize the world, as eloquently manifested in the title of the bestseller on linguistic categorization, G. Lakoff (1987), where the list ‘women, fire, and dangerous things’ stands for (a portion of) a particular taxonomy of the world, as reflected in (gender II of) the grammatical system of Dyirbal (a Pama-Nyungan language of North Queensland, Dixon 1972). In the gender-studies literature, one can occasionally come across unwarranted assumptions of a direct encoding of referents in language structure, as far as L-gender is concerned; however, the directness of this link is called into question by in-depth typological study. As examples, among the data we are going to review while analysing the different outputs of diachronic change, we shall examine Romance varieties in which ‘wives’, ‘sisters’, or ‘virgins’ are feminine only in the singular, but masculine in the plural (see $7.8), and others where, symmetrically, a ‘hus- band’ is masculine but plural ‘husbands’ are feminine (see $4.5.3). If gender were just about reference and world categorization, one would wonder what sort of categoriza- tional oddity (and what kind of strange society, from the S-gender point of view) these dialects can possibly mirror.’ Indeed, given data such as these, one has to face the reality that society is not always directly reflected in L-gender, and that much about grammatical gender is just about linguistic form, and must be analysed in purely morphosyntactic terms.* This is the conceptual space in which this book moves. This conceptual space is legitimated not only by linguistic analysis per se but also by the findings of neuro-psycholinguistic research, which attests to a distinction in the neurophysiological substrata to the morphosyntactic and the semantic/referential aspects of grammatical gender, respectively. Thus, dozens of studies on several languages (reviewed in Heim 2008, with the main focus on neuroimaging) provide evidence for the storage of (and access to) gender value information independent of both the noun’s (morphological/phonological) form and of morphosyntactic gender agreement: for example Henaff Gonon et al. (1989) on French; Badecker et al. (1995) on Italian, showing that anomic patients are able to make correct decisions about * In a sense, feminist language critique can be viewed as a sort of applied research in this area (i.e. research which pursues practical aims): applied research should build on the results of basic research. © This goes for both earlier discussions of the ‘grammatical marking of sex in language’ as well as for the ‘more recent feminist conversation-analytic studies (see Alvanoudi 2015: 4f. for an up-to-date review). 7 Note that, throughout the book, the term dialect recurs in the sense of ‘primary geographic dialect’, as customary in Romance linguistics (‘primary’ is used in the sense of Coseriut 1981). * There is no dearth of such cases of unexpected gender assignment in the typological literature: thus, for instance, ‘In some Norwegian dialects, such as older Oslo dialect, the noun mamma ‘mother’ unexpect- edly appears to be masculine (Enger and Corbett 2012: 287).4 Introduction gender agreement triggered by noun lexemes they cannot name.? Caramazza and Miozzo (1997), Miozzo and Caramazza (1997), and Vigliocco et al. (1997) show that access to gender specification must also be posited for non-pathological subjects in a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state (i.e. when the word cannot momentarily be accessed in its phonological/morphological form). More generally, several such neuro-/psycholinguistic studies have been carried out on grammatical gender in the Romance languages: see also, for example Miceli et al. (2002), Padovani et al. (2005), on Italian, Hernandez et al. (2004, 2007) on Spanish, Garnham et al. (1995) on Spanish and French, Finocchiaro (2011) comparing Italian, Spanish, and French with English and German; and on grammatical gender in Romance languages spoken by bilingual and/or heritage speakers (see e.g. Liceras et al. 2008; Klassen 2016; Cuza and Pérez-Tattam 2016). Studies have been carried out with different experimental procedures: behavioural texts (several of which have been mentioned in the previous paragraph), event-related brain potentials (ERPs), as well as neuroimaging (fMRI). The results of fMRI studies summarized in Heim's (2008) metanalysis show that the production and decoding of gender agreement involves activation of the left hemisphere’s Brodman’s area 44 and, more marginally, 45 (i.e. the ‘usual suspects’ for morphosyntax, in Broca’s area), while the lexical storage of gender information is certainly in a distinct brain area, perhaps in the left middle temporal gyrus (BA 21, ‘a potential candidate for lemma selection and retrieval’ (Heim 2008: 62) immediately adjacent to Wernicke's area). On the other hand, ERP studies on gender/number agreement mismatches (reviewed e.g. in Molinaro et al. 2011; Caffarra et al. 2015: 1021) have shown that gender agreement violations elicit a left anter- ior negativity (LAN, with an onset around 300 ms.) and a positive peak (P600) at around 600 milliseconds after presentation, which has traditionally been associated with morphosyntactic violations: see Barber and Carreiras (2005) on Spanish; Molinaro et al. (2008) on Italian, However, Molinaro et al’s results show that phonotactic violations in the selection of the il/lo allomorphs of the M.sc definite article also elicit a P600, which may therefore not be a reaction specific to morphosyntax, unlike as argued in previous studies on gender agreement violations such as, for example, Hagoort and Brown (1999) (on violations in the selection of the gender form of the article in Dutch). More recent literature on P600 effects (see e.g. Bornkessel-Schlesewsky and Schlesewsky 2008; van Petten and Luka 2012; Sassenhagen et al. 2014) also stresses their composite nature, thus challenging the ‘classical’ tenets of this strand of research (see Kutas and Hillyard 1983; Friederici 1995: 276-8 a.o.), according to which semantic vs syntactic violations trigger distinct ERP components, that is, a negative peak in electrical brain activity occurring 400 milliseconds after presentation of the stimulus (N4oo) vs the P6o0 effect, respectively. However, on the one hand, most of this more recent research did not point to Nqoo effects correlating with purely morphosyntactic factors such as agreement mismatches and, on the other hand, both morphosyntactic gender agreement and phenomena like il/ lo selection may be kept together under the heading of syntagmatic non-semantic » Similarly, the jargonaphasic patient studied by Macoir and Béland (2004) was able to identify the gender of French nouns above chance level, regardless of whether her spoken naming deficit allowed her to access the phonological form of the noun,1.2 The method and the basi facts 5 selectional restrictions, and thus, under this definition, still contrast with the N4oo effects triggered by purely semantic violations. Among the standard varieties, Romanian is the least well investigated in the psycholinguistic literature (see e.g. the computational simulations of gender assignment and agreement in Cucerzan and Yarowsky 2003; Nastase and Popescu 2009), whereas work on non-standard dialects is still in its infancy. There is some aphasiological research on Friulian, which concentrates on bilingualism but does not address grammatical gender specifically: see Fabbro and Frau (2001: 257), where (masculine vs feminine) gender agreement on the 3rd singular indicative present form of the verb ‘to be’ (see §8.5) is enumerated in the contrastive description as a characteristic feature of Friulian vs Standard Italian; but none of the errors by aphasic patients reported in the subsequent pages involve that contrast. Thus, while acknowledging that neuro- and psycholinguistic research has great potential for the investigation of non-standard dialects, especially for those whose gender system differs significantly from the mainstream standard languages, the present study will have to concentrate mainly on linguistic analysis proper, leaving systematic neurolinguistic enquiry into those more complex gender systems for future research. To give at least a flavour of how promis- ing such an enquiry may be for cross-dialectal comparison and the study of on-going change, I shall briefly report in $7.4.4 on the preliminary results from an ERP study on one dialect from southern Italy. 1.2. The method and the basic facts ‘Throughout Romance, one observes the contrast exemplified in (1)~(2): (1) a. uma boa/*bom —_rapariga (Pg.) b. una buena/**buen chica (Sp.) c. una bona/*bon —_noia (Cat.) d. une bonne/**bon _ fille (Pr) e. una brava/**-0 ragazza (it) ar good:rsc/M.s¢_girl(r):sc fo fata bun-a/"bun Ro.) ar girl(r)-sc good-rsc/[M.sc] ‘a good gir? (2) a um bom/*boa —rapaz (Pg) bo un buen/**-a chico (Sp.) c. un bon/**-a noi (Cat.) d. un bon/*bonne argon (Fr) e. un bravo/**-a ——_ragazzo (It) aim good:M.sc/rsc_ boy(M):sG f£ un baiat bun/**-& (Ro) am — boy(m)[sc] good[M.sc]/-Rsc ‘a good boy’6 Introduction ‘The nouns occurring in (1)-(2) are traditionally dubbed ‘masculine’ vs ‘feminine’ for reasons which have to do with the world, on the one hand (they denote sexuated beings), and with language, on the other, as they select distinct forms of the article, adjective, etc. (ungrammatical options are shown for the adjective only, but swapping the article forms in (1)-(2) would yield ungrammaticality just as well). Relation to the world is responsible for the traditional labels used to contrast (1) vs (: their first occurrence, in Aristotle's Rhetoric 1407b (quoting Protagoras, 490—c. 420 BC), the labels for those two gender classes have been derived from the words for ‘male’ and ‘female’. The Greek terms attested there for the first time are drrena vs thélea, both qualifying onédmata ‘nouns’, followed by the label of the third gender, skéué, which originally denotes ‘implements’ and consequently seems to be motivated by inanimacy. ‘The Latin term for the third gender, on the other hand (neuter), etymologically means ‘neither-nor’ and also goes back to the ancient Greek grammatical tradition (translating oudéteron, that occurs for the first time in the Téchné attributed to Dionysius Thrax, late second century Bc, see Uhlig 1883: 24.8; Robins 1951: 31; Kilarski 2013: 60). ‘We shall see (in Chapters 2-3) that there is indeed a genuine relationship—under the form of gender assignment rules—between the linguistic category ‘gender’ in Latin and Romance and the referents’ property of being a male or female. However, this relationship cannot be criterial to the definition of (linguistic) gender, for an elementary reason: all languages enable their speakers to talk about males and females, but less than a half of the world’s languages (112 out of the 257 languages in the WALS sample for maps 30-32) have grammatical gender (Corbett 2005a, 2005b, 2005¢), if this is defined as follows: (3) Gender (definition): ‘Genders are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words.’ (Hockett 1958: 231; Corbett 1991: 1) Under this definition, the association with sex of two of the agreement classes is not a valid criterion for deciding whether these are values of the category gender (although it is empirically true that agreement classes with this semantic-referential correlation are genders), and nor is the overall number of such classes. More restrictive definitions do add both criteria, as seen for instance in Aikhenvald (2000): Here I shall use ‘noun class’ as a cover term for noun class and gender. In agreement with the linguistic tradition, I shall reserve the term gender for small systems of two to three distinctions (always including masculine and feminine), like the ones typically found in Indo-European, Afroasiatic, and Dravidian languages. (Aikhenvald 2000: 18). Another case in point is Meléuk (2013), on gender in Spanish, who sets up a list of properties that gender must satisfy (p. 738): Agreement classes {K} of the noun in L are nominal genders if and only if the whole set of Conditions 1-8 is satisfied to a sufficient degree: The number of {K,} is small: 2 to 4. [...] ‘Two of {K,} manifest a direct link with the biological sex of the being denoted by the noun: a noun referring to a male belongs to one class and that referring to a female to another class. (...] Except for the division by sex, {K} do not show a sufficiently visible semantic motivation: in most cases, there is no direct link between the meaning of a noun and its gender.1.2 The method and the basic facts 7 ‘The list further includes criteria 4-8, which are not essential to our discussion, as Meltuk himself makes it clear that the above three are the crucial ones: Note that some properties of nominal gender are ‘more equal’ than others: the positive values of Features 1-3 seem to be (almost) sufficient for dubious agreement classes to be considered as nominal genders. (MeI’éuk 2013: 740) Under this or similar more restrictive definitions, much fewer than half of the languages of the world have gender: clearly, those rubricated in the WALS map 31 as having ‘non-sex-based gender’ (i.e. the 28 blue dots, Corbett 2005b) have none, nor have those with more than four gender values (Mel’cuk)—or more than just three (under Aikhenvald’s 2000 definition)—marked on the WALS map on ‘Number of genders’ (the 24 black and, possibly, the 12 red dots in Corbett 2005a, map 30). ‘There are a number of problems with this kind of approach to grammatical gender." Generally speaking, this, unlike the definition in (3), hinders cross-linguistic com- parability presenting non-sex-based systems (e.g. animacy-based, the second largest class in the WALS sample for maps 30-32; see Corbett 2012: 113) as unrelated to (sex- based) gender. Also, these stricter definitions would leave us uncertain whether noun classes of languages such as the Tshukwe subdivision of Khoisan, mentioned by Dixon (1982: 161) (after Westphal 1962: 30-48)—whose first class ‘contains not only nouns with male referent but also those referring to strong, tall or slender objects; the second nouns referring to females, and to weak, short or round objects; the third, “common” gender includes all else’—must be defined as genders or not, since the relation to sex is not exclusive, and other semantic properties play a crucial role in gender/ class assignment." Furthermore, the varying upper limit of the number of gender values mentioned in the literature (three or four?)—which is kept vague in many of the analyses along these lines (e.g. ‘“Gender” is used for a small system of noun classes’, Dixon 2010: 156; ‘Gender/noun classes {...] typically constitute smallish systems’, Kilarski 2013: 1) —is a sign that these more restrictive definitions are not easy to operationalize.'? Indeed, we shall consider four- and five-gender systems which should not be labelled as such at all given Aikhenvald’s (2000: 18) criteria, We shall also consider gender systems in which one gender value is defined in strictly semantic terms, yet has nothing to do with the division by sex and thus would not qualify as gender under Mel€uk’s (2013: 739) criteria. As Corbett (1991: 30-2) observes, studies on linguistic classification from de la Grasserie (1898) onwards have pointed to a number of semantic properties which may be encoded in gender systems cross-linguistically, including some ‘exoticisms’ 1© ‘There is a long list of authors assuming this or that semantic feature as criterial for gender, sex being in pole-position: see e.g. Chini (1993), Dixon (2010: 156), Grandi (2010), Kilarski (2013: 3), ete. This crucially differs from the typical TE (including Latin-Romance) situation (see $2.3), where classes 1 and 2 centre around a semantic sex-based core, but also include a majority of nouns assigned arbitrarily, with respect to their meaning. *? Dixon (1982: 165) adds “We could replace “smallish” by “delimited”: the important thing is that we should avoid the situation where for every new noun added to the language, a new noun class may also be added’. This is a sound criterion. However, in this context, it is used in order to define ‘noun classes’ (including ‘genders’.8 Introduction such as [+flesh food], [+weapon], [+insect], and the like. Consequently, building one—and only one—semantic/referential property into the definition of gender would entail the impossibility of such gender systems being recognized as such. Finally, there is a ‘biographic’ proof, as it were, of the superiority of (3) over alterna- tives, which consists in the fact that authors assuming more restrictive definitions, such as those just quoted, do so only inconsistently, and/or back off from them, as seen in the following passage (to be compared with the quotation from Aikhenvald 2000 adduced above): When Europeans came to study African languages, they discovered larger genderlike systems with eight or more possibilities in languages like Swahili. These often did not include a masculine- feminine distinction. ‘The term ‘noun class’ came to be used for systems of this types this term and ‘gender’ are also often used interchangeably. To avoid confusion, I use only the term ‘gender’ here. (Aikhenvald 2012: 78, n. 4) In this passage, different terminological traditions in the analysis of different language families are identified as the cause for the persistence of diverging terminolo- gies for what can be treated uniformly under (3): this renders the definition in (3) all the more appropriate for the purposes of cross-linguistic comparison, if one agrees that ‘We should continue to attempt to prove cross-linguistic validity of our features’, on which ‘typological work depends’ (Corbett 2010b: 33). Given this definition, grammatical gender is a category relevant for the description of somewhat less than half of the languages of the world (43.58 per cent, ie. 112/257 in the WALS sample for maps 30-32). Thus, although widespread, this feature is not universal, and it has been argued that it represents a complex and ‘mature’ feature of language, viz. one that ‘presuppose(s] rather long evolutionary chains’ (Dahl 2004: 112)."? In our specific case, the acquisition of this degree of complexity falls into a remote prehistory, and is thus not in focus in the present study (although the topic will be briefly touched upon in Chapter 2). ‘The words associated with nouns, relevant for (3), are those showing agreement, defined in turn as ‘systematic covariance between a semantic or formal property of one element and a formal property of another’ (Steele 1978: 610). The element triggering gender agreement, usually a noun, is termed the ‘agreement controller’, while elements showing agreement are dubbed ‘agreement targets’ (Corbett 2006: 4). Targets displaying gender agreement in Romance are articles (indefinite, as in (1)-(2), as well as definite), adjectives (attributive, as in (1)-(2), as well as predicative), pronouns (3rd person, strong, and clitic, as well as possessive and demonstrative),'* and participles. When participles enter perfective periphrastic verb forms, agreement is subject to syntactic conditions which have been the object of a long series of studies (see e.g. Loporcaro 1998, 2010a, 2016a, with further references), whereas gender agreement on » See Kilarsky (2013: 225-32); Audring (2014) for recent discussions of gender and linguistic complexity. + Pronouns can be at the same time agreement controllers. While 3rd person pronouns are both agree- ‘ment target and controllers, 1st and and person pronouns are only controllers and do not agree in gender in the Romance languages. A notable exception is compound forms stemming from Nos/VOS+ALTEROS/-AS, which include the originally adjectival gender inflection: eg. Sp. nosotros/-as ‘we.m/F’, vosotros/-as ‘you.PL.M/F’).1.2 The method and the basic facts 9 simple finite verb forms occurs rarely across Romance, as does agreement on other targets, briefly addressed in $8.5. All of these targets show cumulative exponence of gender and number, as is usual in fusional languages. At times, this may give rise to uncertainty in the analysis of a given morphological expression whether it is signalling a value of gender or of number: some such controversial cases are discussed in 4.5.4 and Chapter 5. It is important to underscore that while for agreement targets both gender and number are properties expressed in contextual inflection (Booij 1994, 1996), when it comes to nouns, there is a clear difference between the two. Gender—according to (3)—is an inherent morphosyntactic property of the nominal lexeme, which in the relevant literature is viewed from one of the two perspectives labelled as follows by Thornton (2009: 14): (4) a. assign nouns to genders (Genders as containers) b. assign gender to nouns (Genders as feature values) Number, on the contrary, is an inherent property of each word form (Thornton 2005: 105), and thus pertains to Booij’s inherent inflection. Kibort (2010) proposes a more elaborate terminology, contrasting features that are contextual, as is the case for gender on adjectives, with those that are inherent, which are subdivided into inherent and (lexically) fixed (gender on nouns) vs inherent and selected (number on nouns): (5) Inherent vs contextual features (Kibort 2010: 78)!* features: a. contextual e.g. gender and number on adjectives b. inherent and (lexically) e.g. gender on nouns fixed c. inherent and selected: _.g. number on nouns This is a useful terminological distinction, and will be adopted in what follows. Consider It. virti ‘virtue(F)’: it can be inferred to be feminine through inspection of either just the singular NP L-a virtit‘the-F.sG virtue’ or just the plural NP I-e virtit‘the- FPL virtues’. But this is only so because of an implication which holds in Italian, where virtually all nouns selecting the article form /a in the singular take le in the plural."* If this were not the case, considering just one word form would not suffice: to establish the gender value of a noun, one has to consider the agreement pattern selected by the + Kibort’s taxonomy is organized binarily: ‘contextual’ further branches into ‘determined through agreement vs government’, and both ‘fixed’ and ‘selected’ branch into ‘based on formal vs semantic criteria. 1 There is just one exception: I(a) eco ‘the echo’, plural gli echi ‘the.st.Pt. echoes’ (note that, while the prevocalic form of the article /1/ does not show gender, selection of /la/ with eco is manifested whenever a consonant-initial adjective—which by the way also shows gender agreement—is interposed: I-a tremend-a ec-o ‘the-F.6 tremendous-rsc echo-sc’). Similar generalizations hold consistently across Romance: for instance in Romanian, feminine nouns taking -a as a singular definiteness marker select le in the plural, with the sole exception of fragd ‘wild strawberry(e)’, pl. fragi(i) (masculine) (Hall 1973: 189), which is reanalysed as a regular masculine by many speakers, creating a new singular frag(ul) (Diaconescu 1974: 15). ‘Much more systematic exceptions—so systematic, actually, that they cease to be ‘exceptions, in a sense to bbe made precise in $4.4.1—concern the symmetrical mismatch as found eg. in Ro. braj(ul)/brafe(le), It. il braccio/le braccia ‘the arm/-s’ (masculine singular/feminine plural).10 _ Introduction lexeme as such (ie. its entire inflectional paradigm, e.g. la virti/le virti), and put it—qua lexeme—into one of the ‘containers’ (under (4a)) available in the grammatical system, or assign it one feature value (under (4b)). This does not apply to number: by definition, (Ia) virtit has one number value, (/e) virtt has another.'” Note that even though gender and number are inherent (in different senses) in the noun, for the diagnosis of their values contextual information is both necessary and sufficient: in addition, nouns are often overtly marked for number (although they may not be, as is the case for uninflected nouns like It. virtw, or for nearly all nouns in spoken French), whereas systematic overt gender marking is much rarer (see §$3.2.2, 4.4.1.3, 5-4-2, 8.6). To conclude, then, one can say that genders are paradigmatic classes of nouns, established on syntagmatic evidence. This makes a crucial difference with respect to another kind of classe, that also proves relevant to the analysis of gender systems, viz. inflectional classes: (6) Inflectional class (definition): ‘An inflectional class is a set of lexemes whose members each select the same set of inflectional realizations’ (Aronoff 1994: 182) Contrary to gender, membership in inflectional classes is established solely on paradigmatic grounds, through inspection of the forms occupying all paradigm cells: these, in the noun morphology of all modern Romance languages except Romanian (see $4.4.1) are two in total, distinguished by number values. Inflectional classes are relevant because (a) they may be predictors of gender assignment (in case of overt gender, Corbett 1991: 62), and (b) their association with productive inflectional classes is an important criterion in order to establish gender values (see Gardani 2013: 424 and §6.2 below). ‘There is still one conceptual distinction which needs to be introduced, to complete the toolbox I am going to work with. This is the the distinction between target and controller gender in Corbett’s (1991: 151) terms (dubbed alternatively ‘inflectional’ vs ‘selective’ gender by Hockett 1958: 230, or ‘contextual’ vs ‘inherent’ gender by Jobin 201: 319): (7) target vs controller gender (Corbett 1991: 151): “We should [...] differentiate controller genders, the genders into which nouns are divided, from target genders, the genders which are marked on adjectives, verbs and so on.’ Corbett illustrates the distinction with a Romance language (Romanian), for which most analyses assume three genders, in spite of the fact that there are just two sets of istinct agreeing forms marking gender on all agreement targets, as schematized in (8a) (with the endings of Romanian 1st class adjectives; see §4.4.1.1 for concrete examples): 7 This is a point which we shall bear in mind while discussing the status of the mass/count distinction in Asturian in Ch. 5. Exceptions to the above are limited: eg. ‘lexical plurals’ (see Acquaviva 2008) such as le acque (di un fiume) ‘the waters (of a river)’, or defective lexemes with just one number value (singularia or pluralia tantum),1.2. The method and the basi (8) a. Two sets of targets, b. Two sets of targets three sets of controllers four sets of controllers I I @ a -0 a \ I Ill aN e “a a IL e In (8a), the controller genders outnumber target genders by one, whereas in (8b)— another possible type of gender system, exemplified in (62), $7.8 below—they do so by two. The reverse kind of mismatch is possible, as well: there may be gender agreement targets which remain in use (for certain functions, to be illustrated in $$4.3.3- 43.4 with examples such as Sp. -o rar-o es que ‘the-N strange-M.sc is that...’) after all of their controller nouns have been reallotted to other genders. Using the image introduced in (4a), the latter situation is one in which one of the boxes has been emp- tied but not destroyed, and it still has a distinct label on it (the agreement targets), differentiating it from the remaining containers. Conversely, (8) corresponds to having more boxes than labels, or, more exactly, in having boxes distinguished through labels that are partially (but not entirely) shared between some of them (i.e. syncretic agreement targets). The distinction in (7), together with the other notions introduced in (3)-(6), will be instrumental for classifying Romance variation. Diachronic change in grammatical gender, it will be shown, can often be effectively described as a transition between two different mappings of (controller) genders onto agreement targets. As usual, such transitions are smooth, so that variation beween two different schemes of the kind seen in (8a-b)—to which several more will be added in due course—will be one of the main tools in our description of change in this area of Romance grammar. A final note on terminology is in order here. While the target vs controller gender distinction is still not universally accepted (see e.g. Giurgea 2014 for an explicit rejec- tion), virtually all studies of gender work with the notion ‘inflectional class’ and often refer explicitly to the definition of gender in (3). Yet, one often finds reference to (3) combined with incompatible statements such as the following: ‘bigender nouns (e.g. assistente, assistant) do not have grammatical gender but instead acquire it from the context in which they occur’ (Cacciari et al. 2011: 416). Of course, production precedes decoding (in context) and, while it is true that in, say, It. lassistente é arrivata ‘the assistant(F) has arrived.r.sc’, it is contextual information (on the participle) which allows the listener to figure out that a female assistant is meant, speakers have this instruction available for production, by definition (and as shown by the psycholinguistic research on lexical access mentioned at the end of $1.1), when they retrieve assistente(r), as opposed to homophonous assistente(m), from their mental lexicon (Corbett 1991: 7).. Note that there is no viable alternative to the assumption of two homophonous lexical items, assistente(F) vs assistente(m), differing only in the specification of the gender feature assigned inherently, not contextually. Another related, but not identical, issue is whether this specification is stored in the lexical entry (and in its mental lexical representation) or can be derived from other lexical information, either formal “a12 Introduction or semantic, The latter assumption is often made, in typological studies (see e.g. Kibort 2010: 84), and analyses of particular languages often assume underspecifica- tion and assignment rules for one or more of the feature values (see e.g. Halle and Vaux 1998, or Pescarini 2007 on Latin). Not uncommonly, terminological and conceptual inconsistency in the literature on Latin/Romance gender crucially concerns the relationship between inherent features, such as gender and inflectional class, and morpho(phono)logical form. Consider, for example, the following quotation: the gender marker may be idiosyncratically assigned, as in mecen-as, which contains [a] although it is masculine. The plural marker is acquired lexically, because these words are only plural in form since they show singular agreement (Lloret and Viaplana 1997: 179).. Given (3)-(6), since Sp. mecenas triggers masculine singular agreement (el viej-o mecenas ‘the old-M.sG maecenas(m)’), it hardly makes sense to claim that its -s is a plural marker, although -s marks plural elsewhere, and that its -a- is a feminine marker, although this ending occurs on feminine nouns of the productive ist class (see §3.2.2). In the following chapters, we shall occasionally come across other examples of such inconsistencies, which often correlate with questionable analyses (see e.g. n. 35, Ch. 3; §4.4.1.4; the outset of $7.3; or n. 13, Ch. 8), showing that terminological accuracy is a first, and important, step towards a water-tight account. 1.3. Synchrony and diachrony of Romance gender systems: the basic issues With the descriptive tools now outlined, we are are equipped to set off on our journey across time and space. First of all, this book will show that there is much more to Romance gender than one might suspect based on the selection of data illustrating the binary gender system in the standard Romance languages in (1)-(2). In particular, the decisive evidence to realize this comes from inspection of the data from modern non-standard dialects, as well as from earlier stages of these and of the major languages. This fine-grained inspection will reveal gender systems that are not only interesting per se, but also provide crucial clues to diachronic reconstruction, and in particular, to answering the big overarching question that will accompany us throughout the book: ‘What happened to the Latin neuter?’. Since almost all of the modern major Romance languages have reduced their gender systems to a two-way masculine vs feminine contrast, thus simplifying the inherited three-gender system, many scholars have assumed that this reduction must be projected back into Proto-Romance. This commonplace cuts across different kinds of literature/sources, from reference work ‘on Classical and Late Latin ((9)), to comparative Romance grammars ((10)), to historical grammars of the individual languages ((11)), to monographic studies on the destiny of the Latin neuter ((12)): (9) a. ‘Le neutre n’a pas subsisté dans les langues romanes’ [‘the neuter did not survive into the Romance languages’] (Ernout 1945: 6). b. ‘Wohl erst in den folgenden Jahrhunderten breitete sich die zugrundelieg- ende Tendenz so stark aus, da es zu einem allgemeinen Schwund des1.3 Synchrony and diachrony of Romance gender systems: the basic issues 3B Neutrums, das in den romanischen Sprachen als besonderes Genus beim Substantiv und Adjektiv nicht existiert, kam’ [‘Only in the following centuries [ie. after the first century aD-M.L.] did the underlying tendency [ie. the tendency for neuters to be re-assigned to the masculine gender-M.L.] spread so massively, that it led to a general demise of the neuter, which does not exist as a separate gender in the noun and the adjective in the Romance languages’) (Stefenelli 1962: 61). c. ‘the Romance languages have lost the neuter as a morphological category’ (Adams 2013: 415). (10) » ‘Das Neutrum fallt mit dem Maskulinum zusammen, vor allem in den II. Deklination’ [‘the neuter merges with the masculine, especially in the 2nd declension’] (Coseriu 2008: 78). b. “The neuter diaspora: from three to two genders [...]. In Popular Latin and Romance the neuter gender as a category was dismantled and its members were relocated in several ways.’ (Alkire and Rosen 2010: 192). (a) 2 ‘Possuia a lingua latina trés géneros: masculino, feminino e neutro; o romance, porém, guardou apenas os dois primeiros, fundindo geralmente 0 neutro singular no masculino’ (“The Latin language possessed three genders—M, F and N—Romance, on the contrary, has only preserved the former two, merging generally the neuter singular with the masculine’] (Nunes 1975: 221). b. ‘La principale innovazione romanza nel dominio dei generi é la scomparsa del neutro come genere funzionante (opposto ad altri)’ [“The main Romance innovation in the domain of genders is the disappearance of the neuter as a functioning gender (contrasting with others)’] (Tekavéié 1980: 2.66). (12) p ‘Es ist eine bekannte Tatsache, daf das Neutrum als grammatisches Genus im spateren Latein und damit auch in den romanischen Sprachen untergegangen ist’ [‘It is a well-known fact that the neuter as a grammatical gender collapsed in late Latin and hence also in the Romance languages’] (Schén 1971: 4). b. ‘proceso [...] panromanzo’, consisting in the ‘redistribuzione degli antichi neutri latini nelle due categorie superstiti’ (‘a pan-Romance process’, ‘the reallocation of the ancient Latin neuters to the two surviving categories’] (Magni 1995: 134). This list of quotations, exemplifying the received opinion, could be multiplied ad libitum. Unsurprisingly, this opinion is referred to matter-of-factly in literature on neighbouring domains, such as Indo-European studies: Several languages have ‘lost’ one gender: in Romance, Modern Celtic and Modern Baltic, the neuter has been assimilated into the other two declensions (Clackson 2007: 91)."* 18 As for terminology, the quotation exemplifies a widespresad brachylogy, since gender and inflectional class were tightly connected in Latin (for historical reasons), but they need not be universally so, and are generally not in Romance.14 Introduction Indeed, there is a fundamental truth to the handbook wisdom exemplified in (9)-(12), as it is true that (a) most Romance varieties nowadays have only two (controller) genders (see (7) above for the definition); and (b) most Latin neuters were reassigned, according to the following scheme (where Romance outcomes are exemplified with Italian forms): (3) Latin Italian pl. fogli : ; change in gender (> m), not in number a. [sg.rourum — | >| sg. foglio ‘sheet(m) of paper b. | pl. Fouta > | 8g. foglia ‘leaf(r)" change in both gender (> F), and number ‘sheet of paper lea” pl foglie |= Feanalysis as feminine singular This double development of several neuter lexemes is a time-honoured commonplace in Romance historical linguistics (see e.g. Diez 1882: 418; Meyer-Liibke 1883: 125f., 154f.). While (13a) is the majority case, there are many examples of (13b) to be found in Late Latin: in Classical Latin, for instance, folia was the plural to folium ‘leaf, sheet(n)’, but a synonymous folia rsc—generating a full 1st declension paradigm: foliae NOM.PL, {foliarum GeN.PL, etc.—is documented in Isto., Orig. 17.9.105 (Appel 1883: 60) (see (7), Ch. 4). The early documentation of feminine folia is reflected in its pan-Romance outcomes, from Iberia (Pg. folha, Sp. hoja) to Dacia (Ro. foaie). While all of this is undoubtably true, it does not exhaust the issue of the doom of the Latin neuter, contrary to what is implied by most of the authors mentioned in (9)-(12) and many others, who assumed that with the disappearence of the neuter in Vulgar Latin, former neuter plurals in -A (as PRATA from PRATUM, BRACHIA from BRACHIUM) functioned as feminine singulars in -A. The result was a high frequency of doublets with slight difference of meaning: masc. pRATUM ‘meadow’ beside fem. pra ‘meadowland’; masc. BRACHIUM ‘arm’ beside fem. BRACHIA ‘the two arms’. (Kahane and Kahane 1949: 169). Indeed, occasionally, more cautious statements on this issue are encountered, especially in the literature reviewing textual evidence from the Latin-Romance transition. ‘Thus Vaananen (1967), in a section entitled ‘Déclin et survie du neutre’, says: Si les neutres étaient sujets & passer aux masculins, il n’en est pas moins vrai que le neutre comme partie intégrante du systéme a persisté jusqu’a la veille de la phase romane et méme au-dela (Vaaindinen 1967: 109) [While neuters were subject to becoming masculine, it is nonetheless true that the neuter as an integral part of the system persisted until the eve of the Romance stage and even beyond). A number of facts suggest that this caution is appropriate and that the commonly held opinion in (9)-(12) should be questioned. Its revision is one of the principal goals of the present monograph. 1.4 Outline of the book ‘The rest of the book proceeds as follows. Chapter 2 addresses gender in Latin, paying particular attention to aspects relevant to the further development of the gender1.4 Outline of the book 15 system in Romance. Chapter 3 provides a first overview of Romance gender systems in their most widespread and best-known shape, as found in the major standard languages, and, in addition, covers gender assignment rules, although only synthet- ically. Chapter 4 moves on to considering Romance gender systems in more detail. Specifically, while data from languages other than the major standard ones are mentioned cursorily in Chapter 3 only to exemplify either identity with, say, Italian, Spanish, French, etc., or to illustrate more reduced systems, the scrutiny of dialect variation across space and time in Chapters 4-6 will show that several more complex systems are attested, in living dialects as well as in the past documented stages of Romance. These are capitalized on crucially in Chapter 7 in order to provide a novel comprehensive diachronic reconstruction of the development of grammatical gender from Latin to Romance. Chapter 8, finally, addresses a series of related topics not covered in the main bulk of the monograph, such as the issue of internally motivated vs contact-induced change in the gender system, the occurrence of strictly semantic gender values, of gender agreement on ‘unusual’ targets (such as finite verbs or even nouns), and of instances of overt gender marking on nouns which—unusually, again— depend on the syntactic context. The last chapter thus departs from the diachronic perspective which shapes the book, and highlights the interest of data from lesser- known Romance varieties such as those focused on here for linguistic-typological research on grammatical gender.2 The starting point Gender in Latin ‘This chapter does not aim to produce a comprehensive study of the gender system and gender assignment in Latin. Rather, the goal is to provide a minimum of information on both (§§2.1-2.2), keeping an eye on later Romance developments, selecting the topics which will then be referred back to while analysing Romance gender systems. The chapter also sketches an overview of the Indo-European (IE) prehistory of the Latin system (§2.3), which is instrumental to a better understanding of Latin, but also sets the stage for addressing (§2.4) some typological generalizations which are widely held of Indo-European but that, as I shall show in what follows, do not stand up to closer inspection, as soon as Romance dialect variation is brought into the picture. 2.1 The three genders of Latin Latin had three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter, as exemplified in (1): (2) a. mot-us est pes me-us moved-NOM.M.SG be.PRS.3sG foot(M).NOM.SG _1SG-NOM.M.SG ‘my foot moved’ (Ps. 93.18) b. ut man-us me-a sit semper comp hand(r).NOM.sG 1SG-NOM.RSG be.PRs.sB]v.38G always cum eo with 3SG-ABL.M.SG “be my hand always with him’ (Ps. 88.2) c cum[...] iam in foro celebrat-um me-um as already in forum celebrated-NOM.N.SG _1SG-NOM.N.SG nomen esset name(N)-NOM.SG _ be.IMPR.SBJV.3SG ‘as my name was already celebrated in the forum’ (Cic., Brutus, 90.314.19) Gender agreement on the adjective—where it is displayed cumulatively with number and case—shows a three-way contrast that must be recognized synchronically, given the definition of gender in (3), Chapter 1. Diachronically, the contrast in (1) is the Gender from Latin to Romance. First edition. Michele Loporcaro © Michele Loporcaro 2018. First published 2018 by Oxford University Press2.1 The three genders of Latin 17 natural link between (late) Proto-Indo-European (PIE), as will be seen in $2.3, and the Latin-Romance outcomes to be addressed in the following chapters. ‘There are several aspects of the Latin gender system that are a matter of debate, concerning gender assignment, on the one hand, and the architecture of the gender- marking system, on the other. The former will be addressed in §2.3; let us now turn to the latter. Several analyses have questioned the assumption of a three-gender system in Latin, with an eye on later Romance developments: for example “The Latin neuter was a subdivision of the masculine’ (Hall 1965: 422). They maintain that the neuter was no longer a fully-fledged gender (e.g. Pescarini 2007: 187; Pomino and Stark 2009), and consequently write ‘Latin “neuter”’ in quotes. Such analyses capitalize on the fact that, in Classical Latin, neuter endings on agreement targets are often homophonous with those selected by other genders. Oblique case endings were shared with the masculine and, even in the nominative/accusative, syncretism was rampant: for example bon-a ‘good-NoM/ACc.N.PL’ has an ending which is not biuniquely dedicated, as it also occurs in the feminine singular, which boils down in the authors’ view to ‘the absence of specific neuter plural endings in Latin’ (Pomino and Stark 2009: 240). The same applies to bon-um ‘good-NoM/ACC.N.SG’, whose ending is homophonous with the masculine singular accusative. However, such analyses suffer from shortcomings, both theoretical and empirical. On the theoretical side, first, they rest on a pretheoretical notion of a dedicated (or ‘specific’, in the authors’ terminology) ending: in fact, the homophonous NoM.F.sG and NOM/ACC.N.PL endings -a on gender agreement targets (in class one adjectives and participles), while related diachronically through common PIE ancestry (see e.g. Luraghi 2006: 92; Rigobianco 2014: 37), belong to distinct paradigm cells—and so, actually, are an instance of syncretism—in the synchronic analysis of Latin gender/ number/case agreement. Secondly, these analyses mix up gender and inflectional class: if one assumes the definitions in (3) and (5)-(7) in Chapter 1, syncretism in the inflections is not in itself proof of the non-existence of a gender class, all the more so—coming to the empirical flaws of this stance—if distinctive endings turn out to be there, after all. This was indeed the case, since alongside syncretic bon-u-m, bon-a, there were also, in pronominal paradigms, id, quod, quid, istud, illud, hoc, and haec, which were distinctively neuter forms. Some of these even provided the model for analogical innovations, such as istoc (alongside Classical istud), occurring in Pl. Bac. 382 (see Merlo 1917b: 92), formed on the analogy of hoc in Archaic Latin. Later on, a Late Latin *illoc must be assumed on Romance reconstructive evidence, to be displayed in $7.4 below. Noun inflection is less conclusive in this respect, except in the case of overt gender (ie. the circumstance in which ‘the gender of a noun is evident from its form’, Corbett 1991: 62). Indeed, several noun ICs, and all those hosting neuter nouns, were uniquely associated with gender in Latin:' * The account in (2) is not a full one. Thus, within the 3rd declension, that in (2c) is only one of the inflectional microclasses distinguished by Gardani (2013: 103-6). Besides, the exceptional microclass (2b) within the and declension, exemplified there with wulgus,-i ‘people’ (also including uirus,-i ‘poison’ and18 ‘The starting point: Gender in Latin (2) a. and ded. (regular) |b. and dec. (exceptional) |. 3rd decl. ]d. 4th dec), sG.Nom/acc | donum uulgus tempus corna GEN doni uulgi temporis | cornas DAT don6 uulgo tempori | corn ABL d uulgo tempore — | corna pi.nom/ace | dona = tempora | cornua GEN donérum — temporum | cornuum pat/aBL | dénis a temporibus | cornibus Nouns inflecting according to any one of the paradigms in (2) could take no other agreement pattern than the one exemplified in (1c), contrasting with (1a--b): in other words, the neuter gender was marked in Latin noun inflection (an instance of overt gender).’ This situation lasted throughout the documented history of Latin, as wit- nessed by the rise of new neuter inflections not only on agreement targets (as seen above) but also on nouns. Thus, for instance, a novel plural ending -ora was extracted through reanalysis from 3rd declension nouns like tempor-a (in (2c)), and this happened at a time when the unambiguous overt-gender nature of neuter noun inflections was still preserved (see §7.1 below). In fact, the oldest example mentioned in Aebischer’s (1933: 71) study—armora ‘arms’ (instead of CL arma) in the Mulomedicina Chironis (S19, p. 9, 1. 25; see TALL 2.622.25-9)—dates back to the fourth century ap, and a host of later examples of ora-plurals has been gathered in the literature on Late Latin (see E. Lofstedt 1936: 164f.; Vaananen 1981: 105; Stotz 1998: 102-5). For some of them, evidence from several Romance branches, including those where ora-plurals have not become productive, suggest that such plurals must be reconstructed for Late Latin, as is the case for example, for FIMUS,-ORA ‘manure’, FUNDUS,-oRa ‘estate’ (REW 3311.2, 3585.2: see discussion in Ivanescu 1957: 308). ‘This plural ending occurred in Late Latin texts from all over continental Italy (except Calabria: see Stotz 1998: 4.104), including the north: for instance, the earliest example from Piedmont inventoried by Aebischer (1933: 10) dates from AD 793 (camporas pelagus,-i ‘sea!), is defective (lacking the plural) and cannot be compared, for numerosity, with (2a). Similarly, the number of well documented 4th declension neuters is just five (Klingenschmitt 1992: 121). Yet, all the inflectional (micro)classes in (2) share the generalization that the nominative and accusative cells are syncretic: this defines neuter nouns throughout the history of Latin, as long as grammatical case was alive and well. 2 Thisis often denied in the literature, in the context of arguments that use the notion ‘inflectional class'in a way incompatible with definition (6), Ch. 1. Thus, for instance, Pescarini (2007: 188) claims that in both Latin and Romanian ‘il neutro sembrerebbe essere una distinzione di genere secondaria che non viene mai ‘messa in relazione diretta con alcuna classe flessiva’ {neuter semis to be a secondary gender distinction that is never directly related to any inflectional class). This is untenable, under the definitions of gender and IC introduced in (3), (6), Ch. 1 since all the classes in (2) are uniquely related to a distinct agreement pattern (1c), contrasting with both masculine and feminine. Note that Pescarini apparently seems to work with defini (6), Ch. 1, since he calls ‘ICs’ Latin noun declensions, which do satisfy that definition,2.1 The three genders of Latin 19 puplicas ‘public fields’, HPM 1.25), while from the twelfth century onwards, examples are limited to place names. This squares well with the fact that northern Italy preserves ora-ending forms (almost) only in place names (see Salvioni 1904-5: 108), apart from a few lexicalized remnants.’ Contrarily, many central-southern Italian dialects have preserved ora-plurals to this day (see $4.5), as did Romanian (see $4.4.1), which indicates that the medieval attestations of locora, fundora ‘estates’ and the like are not a ‘mode savante, [...] una sorta di latinorum degli scrib? [‘an intellectual fashion, a sort of fake-Latin of the scribes’] (Magni 1995: 166),* but show popular speech ‘perco- lating’ into written usage, as pointed out for example by Stotz (1998: 4.104). Not only did the neuter gender develop new inflections on both targets and controllers, throughout the history of Latin: it also constantly acquired new members, that is, it attracted new noun lexemes from other genders. This fact is often down- played in the literature on the diachrony of gender (assignment) in Latin, which focuses on the (admittedly many) instances of reassignment of individual nouns from. the neuter to either the masculine or, more rarely, the feminine (see e.g. Appel 18835 Stefenelli 1962: 61; Adams 2013: ch. 19, among many others), as exemplified in (3a-b): (3) a. n>: dorsus ‘back’ Pt. Mil. 397, lactem ‘milk’ Per. 71.1, uinus ‘wine’ PeTR. 41.12, candelabrus ‘candle-stick’ Perr. 75.10 (TLL 3.233) b. N> F: (ex) promissa ‘(due to the) promise’ (Commoptan., Apol. 983; see Appel 1883: 55), rapa ‘turnip’ PeTR. 66.7, (cum magna) spolia ‘(with much) booty’ (AuGusTINE, Serm. 14.6.1), chronica (GREG. Tur., Franc. 1 praef., MGH Script. Rer. Merov. I, p. 33.11: per chronicas uel historias anteriorum annorum ‘through chronicles or histories of the foregoing years’; TALL 3.1030); arua ‘field’, castra ‘fortified post’ (Adams 1999: 125) ‘This focus is due to the fact that such studies on innovation in Late/Vulgar Latin are conducted retrospectively, ‘im Hinblick auf die romanischen Sprachen’ (‘with a view on the Romance languages’], as the title of Stefenelli (1962) has it. Therefore, they tend to emphasize cases such as (3a) (from neuter to masculine), although the reverse—as shown in (4)—also occurs, even in the very same texts: (4) a. M>wN: thesaurum ‘treasure’ PETR. 46.8, libra ‘books’ PeTR. 46.7, catilla ‘bowls’ PETR. 50.6, puteum ‘pit’ PoMpon., Dig. 19.1.14 (plural putea ‘pits’ as early as in VarRo apud Non. p. 2173, alongside CL putei; Kiihner and Holzweissig 1912: 477) b. F>N:palpebrum eye-lid’ CAEL. AUREL., Chron. 2.5 (Kihner and Holzweissig 1912: 479), margaritum ‘pear? PETR. 55.6, 9,° and a host of later cases discussed * ‘Thus, if continuants of Locora ‘places’ survive to this day in Northern Italo-Romance, they are reanalysed as singular, be they preserved as appellatives (as in Emilian légher ‘small estate), or only as place ['loger], in the Emilian dialect investigated by Uguzzoni 1975: 51). ilar, untenable, claim can be found in Aebischer (1933: 14), according to whom the ora-forms ‘occurring in Northern Italian documents of the early Middle Ages ‘appartiennent & un langage non parlé, a un langage figé’ [belong to non-spoken, formulaic, language’). * Both margaritum,-i‘ and margarita,-ae F first occur in Varro, Men. (early 1st century 8c), but since this is a loanword from Gk. margari,-idos fit is safe to assume that the 1st declension feminine margarita (derived from the reanalysis of the Greek accusative singular form margarida) is older (see Rovai 2012: 202).20 ‘The starting point: Gender in Latin in Stotz (1998: 6-7), like terebrum ‘drill’ since Hieronymus, infamium ‘infamy’ since the Vetus Latina, ignominium ‘ignominy’ since CoMMODIAN., Carm. 1.19.1, ete. ‘The ‘retrospective’ reading of this vacillation frequently verges on a teleological inter- pretation. Thus, comparing (3a)/(4a), Stefenelli (1962: 61) regards the former as har- bingers of Romance development, the latter as hypercorrections: ‘Auch in diesen umgekehrten (vielleicht hyperkorrekten) Bildungen kommt das Schwinden des Gefiihls fiir das Neutrum zum Ausdruck’ [‘Also in these back-formations, perhaps hypercorrected, the fading of the sense for the neuter manifests itself’]. Indeed, in his thorough review of the Late Latin evidence, Stotz (1998: 144) concludes that ‘die Anwendung von Masculina als Neutra’ [‘use of masculines as neuters’] (ie. (4a)) is rarer than the reverse, which is in keeping with the long-term trend in Romance that eventually led to the binary contrast in examples (1)-(2), Chapter 1, and must reflect on-going linguistic change, since masculines were more numerous from the outset, so that given an even distribution of deviations, cases of M > N ((4a)) would be expected to outnumber the reverse ones (N > M, (3a)). However, whether (4a) was just the product of ephemeral hypercorrections, or also reflected linguistic change, is ultimately an empirical question: should it turn out that the neuter gender—neuter agreement in (1c) and, at the same time, dedicated neuter inflection on nouns—lived on in at least part of Romance, then (4a) could not be dismissed as just haphazard deviations, lacking linguistic motivation. Inspection of the Romance evidence in Chapters 4-6 will cast light on the matter. As for the earlier period, there is abundant evidence for the productivity of the neuter in Archaic Latin. Rovai (2012) recently sifted the relevant evidence, showing that some neuter o-stems were created secondarily from original masculine o-stems or from feminine 1st declension nouns. The chronology of Latin attestation and/or IE comparison shows that nouns like those in (5), which are usually neuter but do also occur as masculine, if more seldom, were originally masculine: (5) caelum ‘sky’, collum ‘neck’, compitum ‘crossroad’, corium ‘skin/leather’, forum ‘forum’, sagum ‘kind of mantle’, tergum ‘back’ Given original *corius, *caelus—Rovai argues—the earliest instances of corium, caelum, etc., in subject function, which in CL are evidence for a neuter paradigm, can be viewed instead as occurrences of the masculine accusative -um as an inactive subject (under active/inactive alignment; in glossing non-passive verb forms, the voice specification is omitted for simplicity): (6) quod periit, periit: meum corium what go_lost.pRET.38G go_lost.PRET.38G_1SG.NOM.N.SG_ skin(N).NOM.SG cistella with casket(F).ABL.SG “What is lost is lost—the casket and my cuticle together’ (PL. Cist. 703) From this syntactic use, when a more systematic nominative/accusative alignment was established, a novel neuter nominative corium, collum (and the neuter plural241 The three genders of Latin 21 coria, colla, etc.) was abduced (in Andersen’s 1973 terms).* Another popular explanation for the rise of a-plurals to originally masculine class two stems is that they were created to convey collective meaning: see for example Zimmermann (1924) for Latin, as well as Thurneysen (1893: 557) and Eichner (1985: 147) on other Italic languages (Umbrian). This is further assumed to be a remnant of an ePIE stage where *-eh, (> *-@) was a collective marker, which was later to become the neuter plural ending (see e.g. Balles 2004: 55). However, for Latin at historical stages, this remains highly speculative. For instance, Zimmermann (1924: 224) assumes that acinus,-i ‘berry’ formed a collective plural acina, only to remark that not even the earliest documentation backs up this assumption, as in Caro, Agr. 112.2 acina clearly means ‘the (individual) berries’: siqua acina corrupta erunt, depurgato ‘if any berries have rotted, clear them out’. For Latin, thus, a morphosyntactic account a la Rovai seems more adequate than a direct projection of the semantics (in terms of [+collective]) onto inflections which signal gender overtly, and this applies to Italic languages too. Take for instance ‘Thurneysen’s (1893) doubt about Umbrian ueiro/uiro ‘man(N).Acc.PL’ (Tabulae Iguuinae VI and VII) and its relation to Lat. uir ‘man(m)’: Vielleicht sind wir nun allerdings gecwungen, dieses wort von lat. vir zu trennen. Denn wenn collective plurale wie loca zu locus leicht verstandlich sind, geht es doch kaum an, das eminent ‘masculine vir einen neutralen plural bilden zu lassen. (Thurneysen 1893: 557) [we are perhaps forced to disjoin this word from Lat. uir. In fact, while collective plurals like loca to locus ‘place’ are easily understandable, it does not make sense to have the eminently masculine uir ‘man’ form a neuter plural.) Once the morphosyntactic gender value ‘neuter’ is viewed as in principle independent (though, for many lexemes, still related to) collective meaning, this doubt can be dispelled: as for the specific lexeme ‘man’, supportive evidence comes from the Italo- Romance dialects in which ‘husbands’ are neuter, to be considered in $4.5.3 below. Conclusions similar to those concerning M/N vacillation in (5)-(6) are reached by Rovai (2012: 107-13) from the inspection of the evidence about nouns that, ever since Archaic Latin, occur as either ist declension feminines or 2nd declension neuters: (7) arment- ‘cattle’, aru- ‘field’, caement- ‘rough stone’, delici- ‘delight, joy’, exuui- ‘spoils, booty’, fulment- ‘board, labi- ‘lip’, lament- ‘moan’, margarit- ‘pearl, mend- ‘defect’, ostre- ‘oyster’, prostibul- ‘prostitute’, rament- ‘wood shaving’, rap- ‘turnip’, sert- ‘wreath, spic- ‘ear’ Here too, feminines are attested earlier, so that a reanalysis (e.g. menda ‘defect’ r.sG > N.PL) must have occurred, whose trigger context may have been impersonal passives. This is one of the possible analyses of (8), which is ambiguous, as it can also be read as a personal passive construction: © ‘The textual evidence also lends itself to alternative interpretations. Thus, for instance, as Carlotta Viti pointed out to me, in some cases at least gender modification yielding a rarer variant may calque the Greek ‘model. Greek was the prestige language with which all the authors of archaic Latin texts were familiar: e.g. ‘M caelus may be influenced by (or be an allusion to) the Greek synonym ourands. While this kind of influence cannot be ruled out, a general morphosynctactic explanation remains more economical.22 ‘The starting point: Gender in Latin (8) uidebatur compluribus in extremo uerbo seem.IMPF.PASS.38G Many.DAT.M.PL_ in last.ABL.N.SG — word(N).ABL.SG menda esse error(F).NOM.SG/(N).ACC.PL be.INE.PRS ‘it seemed to many that there was an error in the last word’ (GELL., N.A. 1, 7, 3) If (8) is an impersonal passive, menda has to be analysed as accusative plural, whereas if it is personal, menda is a 1st declension feminine nominative. There is independent evidence that the impersonal construction expanded progressively, in the history of Latin, which gradually increased the probability of (8) being reanalysed as impersonal. This reanalysis in turn generated a whole neuter paradigm (mendum,-i), whose nominative/accusative singular form is seen in (9): (9) inhisce uerbis Ciceronis ] neque in DEM.ABLN.PL word(N).ABL.PL Cicero.GEN.sG neither mendum esse neque uitium error(N).NOM/ACC.SG beINE.PRS nor vice(N).NOM/ACC.SG in these words of Cicero [...] there is no error in writing or grammar’ (GeLL., N.A. pr. 1, 6) To conclude, there is abundant evidence that the neuter was an autonomous value of the gender feature in Latin, despite recurrent claims to the contrary. As we have seen, the neuter constantly renewed its agreement paradigm and attracted new members since Archaic Latin (e.g. corium (5) or caementum (7)). This reading of the evidence reverses the usual account, whereby such vacillations are taken as evidence for on-going depletion of the neuter from an early stage, not only for Latin, but also for the other Italic languages (see e.g. Poccetti 2011: 218; Rigobianco 2014: 544). As for late Antiquity, whether or not reassignments to the neuter, as exemplified in (4) above, mirror genuine linguistic development will have to be judged after sifting the Romance evidence in the following chapters. 2.2 The Latin neuter and its functions Neuter agreement has been exemplified in (1c) and discussed so far in the canonical context, with nominal controllers inherently specified as neuters. The Latin neuter, though, had a broader functional domain, and some of its further uses will turn out to be relevant from a Romance perspective. These are addressed in the following sub- sections. 2.2.1 Resumption/pronominalization of non-canonical controllers ‘The neuter could be used for agreement with non-canonical controllers, such as clauses or nouns occurring not just as plain arguments, as in (1), but in syntactic contexts where they were at the same time used argumentally and predicatively (see Pieroni 2012).2.2. The Latin neuter and its functions 23 ‘These non-canonical controllers were resumed by means of the same pronoun and adjective forms signalling agreement with singular neuter nouns (see e.g. Touratier 1994: 365): (10) a, dule-e et decor-um est pro sweet-NOM.NSG and fitting-NoM.N.sG be.prs.3s¢_ for patri-a mori fatherland(r)-ABL.sG die.INEPRS ‘it's sweet and fitting to die for your fatherland’ (Hor., Carm. 3.2.13) b. Negat Piso scire se [...], negat Calenus rem ullam nouam allatam esse; atque id nunc negant, posteaquam [...] ‘Piso denies he knows anything [... ], Calenus denies that anything new came his way; and they deny it.n now, after [...]’ (Cic., Philippica 12.3) c. pergrat-um est mihi quod tam diligenter agreeable-NOM.N.sG be.PRs.3sc uDatsG that so diligently libr-os auuncul-i mei lectitas book(m)-Acc.PL uncle(M)-GEN.SG 1:GEN.SG_peruse.PRS.2SG ‘it very much pleases me that you peruse my uncle’s books so diligently’ (Pun, Ep. 3.53) This function of neuter agreement is found in all branches of IE which preserve a three-way gender contrast (see $2.3), as exemplified by German and Russian in (11): (1) a. German: seiner Frau geht es schlecht und er kann es/**ihn/**sie kaum ertragen ‘his wife is sick and he cannot stand this(N)/**this(m)/**this(F)’ b. Russian: ego Zena bol'na i éto/**étot/**éta ego bespokoet ‘his wife is sick and this:n.s¢/**this:m.sc/**this:r.sG worries him’ ‘This wide occurrence (more examples from Old Indian, Ancient Greek etc. are discussed in Matasovi¢ 2004: 160) suggests that the use of the neuter gender for agreement with (or pronominalization of) clausal controllers reconstructs back as a property of (late) PIE. A further function of neuter agreement in Latin is the one which has been dubbed ‘pancake agreement’ (Faarlund 1977; Enger 2004b; Corbett 2006: 150), as exemplified in (12): (a2) a. uari-um et — mutabil-e semper femin-a variable-NOM.N.sG and inconstant-NOM.N.sG always woman(F)-NOM.sG ‘women are variable and inconstant (beings)’ (VERG., Aen. 4.569£.) b. trist-e Jup-us. stabul-is baleful-nom.n.sc_ wolf(m)-Nom.sG _ stable-DaT.N.PL ‘wolves are a threat for stables’ (VERG., Ecl. 3.80) Studies of Latin grammar (see e.g. Gandiglio 1912: 520-3; Kithner and Stegmann 1971: 32; Orlandini 1994: 173; Touratier 1994: 365; Hofmann and Szantyr 1997: 433-43 Pieroni 2010:24 ‘The starting point: Gender in Latin 426, etc.) have extensively discussed examples like (12a-b). The traditional interpret- ation is that such neuter adjectives with non-neuter subjects are substantivized, possibly ‘avec valeur généralisante’ (‘with a generalizing function’] (Ernout and Thomas 1959: 127). According to Pieroni (2012), the selection of neuter agreement targets is a manifestation of lack of agreement,’ due to the fact that the noun that would be eligible as a controller is not just an argument but cumulates a predicative function. This can be assumed straightforwardly for abstract nouns (see Jespersen 1924: 136), since an abstract noun like turpitudo in (13) can be easily interpreted as semantically equivalent to turpis esse: (a3) turpitudo pei-us est quam dolor disgrace(F):NOM.SG worse-NOM.N.SG_be.PRs.3sG_ than _ pain(M).NOM.SG ‘shame is worse than pain’ (Crc., Tusc. 2.31) ‘The same analysis can be extended to nouns denoting non-abstract entities, so that in (12b) the argument of which triste is predicated is not just the Jupus but is instead either the relation between the ‘wolf’ and the ‘stables’, or the simple fact of there being wolves. The latter can hold of (12a) too, where femina can be taken to denote the ‘fact of being a woman (Pieroni 2012: 525). Be that as it may, we shall see in the following chapters that this function of the neuter gender—the pronominalization/resumption of non-canonical controllers—must be taken into account for the description of changes in the gender system from Latin to Romance. 2.2.2 Gender resolution In Latin, resolution of gender agreement with conjoined controller nouns assigns gender to an adjective or a pronoun according to a mix of semantic and morphosyntactic criteria, which are ordered as follows by Corbett (1991: 287) (based on Kithner and Stegmann 1982: 44-52): (14) a. ifall conjuncts are masculine > masculine b. ifall conjuncts are feminine = feminine c. ifneither (14a-b) is true, and all conjuncts denote animate + masculine beings d, elsewhere — neuter As seen in (14d), neuter is the default value, a situation that was bound to change, as we shall see in Chapters 3-4, when the gender system was restructured in Romance. Examples such as the following are in keeping with the rules in (14): (5) a. aquila{...J, —aper[...] inedia eagle(F):Nom.sG wild boar(m):nom.sc__ hunger sunt consumpt-i be.PRs.3PL consumed-NOM.M.PL ‘the eagle and the wild boar starved’ (PHAEDR. 2.4.23) 7 As for ‘pancake agreement’ contexts, this is closer to Corbett’ (2006: 150, 223) than to Enger's (2004) analysis, the latter treating neuter agreement as an instance of semantic agreement, due to the ‘weak individuation’ of the subject nominal.2.2. The Latin neuter and its functions 25 b. sapientiam, temperantiam, fortitudinem wisdom(r):acc.screstraint(r):acc.sG_courage(F):acc.sc copulat-as esse docui cum uoluptate related-acc.r.PL be.nr teach.preT.isG with _pleasure(F):ABL.sG ‘Thave shown that wisdom, restraint and courage are related to pleasure? (Crc., Fin. 1.50) c. secundae res, honores, imperia, successes(F):NOM.PL civil_honour(M):NoM.PL _ military_honours(N):NOM.PL uictoriae, quamquam —fortuit-a sunt, [...] victory(F):NOM.PL, even_if fortuitous:NOM.N.PL_be.PRS.3PL ‘successes, civil and military honours, victories, even if they are fortuitous, [...]” (Cic., Off 2.20) In (15a), the two nouns of different genders all denote animates, and so masculine agreement is triggered, according to (14c); in (15b), all conjuncts are feminine and the predicate shows feminine plural agreement, according to (14b); in (15¢), all conjuncts differ in gender and do not denote animate beings, so neuter is selected according to (14d). However, neuter agreement also occurs in contexts not predicted by (14): (16) a. stultitiam autem et timiditatem et iniustitiam et intemperantiam cum dicimus esse fugiend-a “but stupidity(r), cowardice(), injustice(r) and haughtiness(), while I say they must be eschewed-acc.n.PL, [...]’ (Cic., Fin. 3.39) b. Cum referent sonum linguae et corporum habitum et nitorem cultior-a quam pastorali-a esse ‘As they reported that accent(m), physical appearence(m) and ornament(M) were too refined-acc.n.PL for shepherds, [...]’ (L1v. 10.4.10) c. parentes, pueros, fratres uili-a habere ‘to regard parents(m), children(m) and siblings(m) as things-Acc.N.PL of negligible value’ (TAC., Hist. 10.4.10) In (a6a-b), neuter agreement is selected in spite of all conjuncts denoting inanimates belonging to the same gender, either feminine ((16a)) or masculine ((16b)); in (16c), on the other hand, the three masculine animates are qualified as uilia (neuter). This shows that selection of the neuter in gender resolution contexts has a wider range of occurrence than is predicted by (14). The extensive philological literature on the topic has shown that there are differences across authors (Gandiglio 1912: 520; Hoffmann and Szantyr 1997: 434). Again, similar to what we have seen in §2.2.1, for resolution too, occurrence of the neuter has been sometimes explained with substantivization of the predicative adjective: for example uilia ‘things of negligible value’ in (16c). However, at least in some authors (Sallust, Livy, Tacitus, etc.), the use of the neuter plural for resolution seems to be possible without substantivization, as seen in (16b) where all conjuncts are masculine, yet cultiora and pastoralia are neuter (see Gandiglio 1912: 520).26 ‘The starting point: Gender in Latin Needless to say, since neuter could be used to pronominalize or resume clauses, as. seen in (10) above, it also had to occur to pronominalize conjoined clauses: G7) tu fortunat-u’s ego miser: 28G.NOM lucky-NOM.M.SG=be.PRS.28G18G.NOM__unlucky[NoM.M.s6] patiund-a sunt tolerate.GER-NOM.N.PL be.PRS.3PL ‘you're lucky, 'm unlucky: these things must be put up with’ (PL., Most. 49) ‘The use of neuter agreement for resolution, in Latin, will have to be kept in mind during the discussion of resolution in modern Romance systems more than binary gender contrasts ($4.4.1.4). 2.3 Gender values and gender assignment from (Proto-) Indo-European to Latin Latin inherited its three-gender system from PIE. Thus, the issue of the rise of the three-way contrast, as well as that of whether or not semantically based gender assignment may have applied at an earlier stage, are issues which transcend the history of Latin and call for comparison within the broader IE perspective. The discovery of Anatolian in the early twentieth century has revealed a binary gender contrast (common vs neuter) for this branch of IE, as exemplified in (18a), to be compared with the “Brugmannian PIE in (18b): (18) a, Hittite: kas hartaggas ‘this bear/predator’ (common, PIE *h,rtko) # ki huitar ‘this (wild) animal’ (neuter, PIE *h,uéid-r), see Kloekhorst (2008: 316, 3556.) b. Late PIE: *s6 ulk"os ‘this wolf” # *séh, h,éwis ‘this sheep’ # *téd péku ‘this domesticated animal’ It is now widely agreed that (18a) represents an earlier stage of the proto-language,* contrary to the alternative view that the Anatolian two-gender system presupposes an earlier three-gender stage: see Zeilfelder (2001: 153-239) for a recapitulation of the debate.” * See eg, Priestly (1983), Ostrowski (1985), HarBarson (1987), (1994), Euler (1991), Tichy (1993), Hajnal (1994, 2004), Melchert (1994, 20m), Stempel (1994), Fritz (1998), Zeilfelder (2001), Meier-Briigger (2002), Balles (2004), Matasovié (2004), Litscher (2009), to mention just a few. Recently, Kim (2009) has proposed that Proto-Tocharian also split off from PIE (still) with a two-gender system, the masculine vs feminine contrast being an independent innovation in this IE branch too. * A still more ancient genderless pre-PIE stage has also been reconstructed. In this vein, Ostrowski (1985) suggests that the two different inflectional classes reconstructed for PIE neuters, distinguished by (what later became) the Nom/acc endings -@ (as in Olnd dsthi bone’, OGk émar ‘day’) vs -o-m (asin Olnd dana-m ‘gift, OGk ostéon ‘boné), must originally have formed one single paradigm, with the two forms occurring in complementary distribution according to the semantic feature (individuated] (Matasovie 2004: 186 follows this view). Thus, for instance, *méms-@/*méms6-m ed-mi must have been semantically distinct as, respectively, ‘T eat meat ~individuated)’ vs ‘I eat the/this meat’, and this contrast must have been available, in principle, throughout the lexicon, at a stage when nouns had not yet divided into distinct inflectional classes (of the kind familiar from Brugmann’s reconstruction). Ostrowski (1985: 319-20) com- pares this reconstructed syntactic marking of individuation with the one at work in south-western Vogul (or Mansi; Ugric, Uralic), where the accusative singular form kiil-ma ‘fish is selected in the clause ‘I ate a2.3 Gender values and gender assignment from (Proto-)Indo-European to Latin 27 Note that the fact that the lexeme for ‘wild animal’ in (18a) is assigned to the neuter, contrasting with the ‘common’ gender, shows that gender assignment in early PIE, as still represented in Anatolian, is not (strictly) semantic. To be sure, semantic rules existed, whereby for example *g"én-h, ‘woman’, *méh,tr- ‘mother’, *ph,tér- ‘father’ were assigned to the common gender, and later split into masculine vs feminine, as they usually do even in languages whose gender system is not fully based on semantics: ‘there will always be semantic assignment rules [...] since no language has a purely formal assignment system’ (Corbett and Fraser 2000: 297). If reconstructed PIE did not have a strictly semantic system, a lack of semantic motivation must hold true all the more for historical daughter languages like Latin. ‘This is worth stressing because there have been attempts to propose that, at the outset, gender must have been strictly semantic in IE and because this issue links with the reconstruction of the number of genders in the proto-language. Before the discovery of Anatolian, Jakob Grimm maintained that gender assignment to inanimates was determined through metaphorical extension from the assignment to humans (Grimm 1819-37: 3.346). From proper names, via the common nouns indicating the same referents (Grimm 1858: 352), gender was finally extended ‘auf alle und jede gegenstinde [‘to all and every object’] (1819-37: 3.346) via sexuated personification.’° Recognition that the masculine vs feminine grammatical distinction was not pri- meval forced proponents of an original semantic motivation to recast this in terms of [+animate], rather than of male vs female, as put forward most influentially by Meillet (919: 202, 1921: 211). Thus, Meillet and Vendryes (1968) claim that la répartition du genre animé et du genre inanimé [...] dépend des conceptions de demi-civi- lisés qui étaient celles des Indo-Européens [....]; ces conceptions s¥taient dailleurs obscurcies avant époque des plus anciens textes de chaque langue. (Meillet and Vendryes 1968: 538f) {the distribution of [nouns over] the animate and inanimate genders depends on the conceptions of the half-civilized Indo-Europeans [...]; these conceptions, on the other hand, were obfuscated before the time of the earliest texts of each language.]* (specific)/the fish’, whereas in ‘I ate a fish’ (non-individuated) the unmarked form kil-@ ‘fish’ occurs. Individual IE languages may have lost such a (semantically motivated) syntactic rule and refunctionalized the original pairs of morphosyntactic forms within one and the same paradigm as distinct lexemes across anguages (as in the pairs seen above) or even within the same language: e.g. Olnd. mas- vs marisd-, both meaning ‘meat’ (occurring in just three passages of the Rig-Veda, always with a specific reading; see ‘Mayrhofer 1996, II: 343-4, 353, who glosses both as synonymous). This supposedly resulted in the rise of the two neuter inflectional classes, and of the common vs neuter gender too, since (what later became) ‘masculine nouns would show ‘die starkste [...] innere Individuiertheit’[‘the stronger inner individuation’) (Ostrowski 1985: 317) and therefore tend to occur with -0-m inflection, which eventually became categorical, yielding the common (later masculine) accusative ending. 1 See eg. Meyer[-Liibke] (1883: 6) for early criticism of this view; see also Wackernagel (1920-24: 2.39); Lazzeroni (1993: 82): ® il genere grammaticale quello che determina il sesso delle personificazioni, non viceversa’ [‘it is grammatical gender that determines the sex of personifications, not the other way round’). In other words, the semantic import of gender (e.g, of the linguistic categorization of objects as masculine or feminine) is conventional, rather than depending on referential properties: see e.g. Boroditsky et al (2003); Phillips and Boroditsky (2003). 1 The labels employed are not neutral, as ‘animate vs inanimate gender’, used by Meillet, tends to co-occur with claims to an original strictly semantic motivation, Other authors employ labels—see Balles (2004: 45) for a list of the different terminological options used to define the two genders in the ePIE28 ‘The starting point: Gender in Latin Some Latin reference grammars adhere to this view (see Hofmann and Szantyr 1997: 8), others reject it as ‘une sorte de vision primitive animiste’ [‘a sort of primitive animist view’] (Touratier 1994: 82). Criticism of the ‘animist’ view of IE gender is to be found in studies in general as well as in IE linguistics (see e.g. Ibrahim 1973: 17, or Villar 1984: 176). In the same vein, Matasovié (2004: 186) alludes to Meillet’s (1920) influential study on the IE names of ‘fire’ and ‘water’ without mentioning him: “The question why there were two words for ‘fire’, and two words for ‘water’ in PIE is not particularly meaningful’; in Matasovié’s view, the co-occurrence of for example masculine *(H)ngnis and neuter *peh,wr both meaning ‘fre’ ‘does not have to imply that the former was viewed as animate and capable of being an agent, while the latter was conceived as essentially passive and inanimate’. While it is uncontroversial that mythologies can play a role in gender assignment systems (see Corbett 1991: 16), for the description of Latin as a historically documented language, reference to the semantics does not offer a general account for gender assignment at any stage. In Latin too, semantic assignment rules occur—as in any language (as noted just above)—accounting for the assignment of masculine or feminine gender to nouns denoting humans and superior animals. As for inanimates, though, masculine and feminine are arbitrary. The neuter, on the other hand, was the only gender value to display a broad correlation with the semantics, since all of its nouns denoted [-animate] referents, apart from class-denoting terms (e.g. animal) and a handful of exceptions: mancipium ‘servant’, prostibulum and scortum both ‘prostitute’, festimonium ‘testimony’ (Adams 2013: 389f.). ‘The fact that the neuter was the only gender in the system to display a semantic correlation will have to be borne in mind while discussing the Romance successors of the Latin gender system (see especially $$4.4-4.5 and Ch. 7). While the reconstruction of (the rise of) gender in the proto-language is still a matter of debate, the later development of gender in the IE languages is to a large extent uncontroversial, as general typological studies on IE gender basically agree on the picture in (19) (based on Priestly 1983; Matasovi¢ 2004; Igartua 2006): (49) Modern developments of the Late-PIE three-gender system: a. preserved: Greek, (most of) Slavic, (part of) Germanic (German, Icelandic, Faroese), (part of) Indo-Iranian; b. reduction to two genders: i. masculine # feminine: Romance (except Romanian), part of Celtic (Irish, Scottish, Manx, Breton), Albanian, Baltic languages (except Old Prussian), some South Slavic dialects (of Slovenian and Serbo-Croat), several Indo-Iranian languages (Hindi, Kashmiri, Rajasthani, etc.); ii, common # neuter: part of Northern (East Scandinavian: Danish, Swedish) and Western Germanic (Dutch, Frisian); system (18a)—which can be read as purely grammatical, such as ‘common’ vs ‘neuter’ or Meier-Briigger’s (2002: 190) even more cautious ‘class A’ vs ‘class B’.2.3 Gender values and gender assignment from (Proto-)Indo-European to Latin 29 ¢. loss of gender contrasts: Armenian, some Iranian languages (e.g. Modern Iranian, Sarykol, Baluchi, Ossetic), many Indo-Aryan languages (e.g. Nepali, Assamese, Bengali, Oriya), part of Germanic (English, Afrikaans). Preservation of the late PIE three-gender system is observed in only a minority of languages ((19a)). Elsewhere, there has been a general drift toward reduction, which has uncontroversially resulted in total loss ((19c)) in languages like Armenian or Farsi (Modern Iranian). On the other hand, including languages like English or Afrikaans under (19c) in such lists depends on the fact that what is recognized by others as a (three-way) gender contrast only occurs on pronouns (Afrikaans hy, sy, dit, E. he, she, it), hence the label ‘pronominal gender’ (see e.g. Audring 2009a), or the distinction (e.g. in Dixon 1982: 164) between ‘grammatical gender systems [...] marked by some or all of: the form of articles and demonstratives; adjectival agreement; and verb agreement’ and ‘[s}emantic gender, as in English’ (Dixon 1982: 169), only marked on pronouns. A more accurate statement of the facts is that English lost its inherited lexical gender system and replaced it by a referential gender system— in the sense of Dahl (2000)—in which only third-person pronouns serve as gender exponents, and which, in addition, is based on two salient conceptual distinctions (animate/inanimate, male/female). (Siemund and Dolberg 20n:: 489f.) Clearly, then, since (19¢) also includes languages where gender has been eradicated from pronouns too, such as Armenian or Farsi, it actually lumps together different types of system. A reduction of the gender contrasts which did not result in total loss usually involved the loss of the neuter, with the exception of West and North Germanic ((agb.ii)).!? In these languages, the reduction took place in a kaleidoscope of different transitional systems. In Dutch, for instance, referential gender signalled through agreement on pronouns co-exists with lexical gender (of the inherited IE kind) as seen in DP-internal agreement (see Audring 2009a, 2009b; De Vos and De Vogelaer 2011). ‘There is a drift towards semanticization (or referentialization) of gender agreement, which seems at the present time to be leading Dutch—or, more precisely, its dialects, at different paces—from a German-like to an English-like situation. This may gener- ate a quite systematic vacillation between common and neuter agreement with nouns denoting inanimates (what Semplicini 2016 calls the ‘double gender’ of many such nouns in Dutch). However, as argued in Loporcaro and Ricca (in preparation), one may frame this state of affairs in terms of concurrent gender systems (see $5.4.1 for discussion of this concept). Variation as the system is undergoing reduction has been described for many languages. Consider for example Ebert’s (1998) description of Fering, the variety of Frisian spoken on the island of Fohr. While Frisian is usually reported to have reduced gender to a binary contrast of the (19b.ii) type, Ebert shows that a three-way gender distinction is partially preserved, in that the form a of the definite article is selected categorically with masculine nouns (e.g. a dochter ‘the. doctor(m)’), the form at with 2 This exception is sometimes overlooked, as is the case for Nichols (2003: 300) (see discussion in Enger 201: 181).30 ‘The starting point: Gender in Latin neuter nouns (at hiis ‘the.n house(n)’), while there is free variation of both with feminines: a/at wiif ‘the.r woman(F)’). While the feminine is undergoing depletion, as many formerly feminine nouns are now consistently either neuter or masculine, nouns like wiif still belong to a third (controller) gender (see (7), Ch. 1). In addition, nineteenth-century descriptions—Ebert shows—still report a three-way (target gender) contrast for the anaphoric article: di maan ‘the.m man()’ vs det hiis ‘the.n house(n)’ vs jii wiif ‘the.k woman(F)’), with a distinct form jii for the feminine, nowadays replaced by det. In systems in which the neuter underwent change, it mostly merged with the masculine ((19b.i)). Occasionally, however, the neuter has been preserved as a third distinct gender but redefined semantically, as was the case in Konkani (Indo-Aryan, see Miranda 1975: 209-13). In fact, in the Mangalore Christian dialects and in both the Christian and Hindu Konkani dialects of Goa, the inherited neuter was reanalysed as a ‘younger-feminine’ gender, as shown in the glosses in (20), where the diachronic development of the gender-agreement morphemes from PIE to Konkani isalso schematized:'* (20) PIE [Old Indo- | Konkani ‘Aryan m|-os |>-as >-9 | to Jonito dhakto edo M ‘he is John’s little boy’ F |(-4) -i]>(-@) -i >-i | tiJoniti dhakti bhoyn F, ‘she is John’s little sister’ N |-om |>-am > -é -i-ii| t& Jonité dhakté edi Fy ‘she is John’s little girl” In closely related Marathi, where this change has not taken place, the original masculine vs feminine vs neuter contrast still occurs: ceda ‘boy/son(m)’ # ced ‘little girl(r)’ # cedii ‘little child(n)’ (see Turner 1966: 267; Miranda 1975: 209, n. 14). However, as far as. the overall architecture of the Konkani gender system is concerned, one can conclude that the change in (20) affected the semantics of the third gender, while leaving the system itself untouched, since this remained tripartite. As will become clear in Chapters 4and 6, the history of the Romance languages and dialects holds in store more radical reshapings of the gender system than the one seen in (20). 2.4 Latin/Romance gender in typological perspective In current studies on gender, in the fields of both historical Indo-European linguistics and linguistic typology, one often finds the claim that ‘the number of genders was not increased in any branch of IE’ (Matasovi¢ 2004: 72), with respect to the three Late-PIE genders, so that no Indo-European language has (or ever had) four grammatical genders: This system is not attested in Indo-European; itis found, however, in Burushaski (isolate), Dyirbal (Pama-Nyungan), as well as in some NE Caucasian languages. (Matasovié 2004: 22, n. 6)! » The table in (20) reproduces the diachronic derivation provided by Miranda (1975: 209). In the feminine, the Old Indian -@ and -i endings merged via a morphophonemic change (see Bloch 1934: 136). + Some examples of non-IE four-gender systems, including Burushaski, are mentioned in $8.1.2.4 Latin/Romance gender in typological perspective 31 ‘The typological survey by Corbett (2005a: 127) seems to encourage this view, mentioning three gender systems as the maximum for IE languages: Given a gender system, the most common number of genders is two. [...] In Indo-European many languages retain three genders (like Icelandic and German), while many others have reduced to two (like French and Spanish); a minority has lost gender altogether (e.g. Eastern Armenian). Four-gender systems are particularly prevalent in Nakh-Daghestanian languages (our sample includes Archi, Lak and Tse), though they occur elsewhere too, as in the isolate Burushaski, (Corbett 2005a: 127) There are indeed IE varieties for which four-gender analyses have been proposed, though not uncontroversially. Thus, while for example Schwink (2004: 100-2) adheres to a two-gender analysis of Eastern Scandinavian (common vs neuter), Plank and Schellinger (1997: 54) give the following account of gender in 3rd person personal pronouns in Danish: (21) Gender in 3rd-person pronouns in Danish (subjective case) SINGULAR | PLURAL mascuLine | han PERSON FEMININE hun de ‘COMMON den NON-PERSON NEUTER det This four-way contrast, also found in Swedish (see also Audring 2014: 9), characterizes only personal pronouns and arose through ‘an encroachment of a demonstrative pronoun [non-neuter den-M.L.] on the territory of 3rd-person pronouns’ (Dahl 2004: 24). This explains why this four-way contrast is not registered as an overall property of the gender system in overviews such as (19) above. Polish also has four genders, under Brown's (1998) analysis, which recognizes a main gender [masculine personal], distinct from the feminine, neuter, and masculine non- personal. This exhausts the list of (types of) analyses which operate in terms com- parable with those of the present study. Starting from different premises, other analyses of the same IE languages come up with even more complex systems: for example six genders for Russian, under Zaliznjak’s (1964) analysis, resulting from a combination of the three traditional values (masculine, feminine, and neuter) with the [+animate] contrast (which is analysed in terms of subgenders in Corbett 1988; Comrie and Corbett 1993: 16); or even eleven genders for Polish, under Przepiérkowski’s (2003) analysis, mentioned in Kibort (2010: 73, n. 9). Even for the reconstructed proto-language, Stang (1945) postulated a four-gender system (with collective as a separate gender value in PIE), a proposal that did not find wide acceptance. In Loporcaro and Paciaroni (2011), the above list of more-than-ternary gender contrasts in IE has been enriched with evidence from Italo-Romance: I shall go through this evidence in $4.5, since Romance gender systems of higher complexity than the32, ‘The starting point: Gender in Latin better-known ones will turn out to be particularly relevant for the diachronic reconstruction to be worked out in Chapter 7. Outside of Romance, the IE language which provides the closest match to the Romance four-gender systems to be considered in $4.5 is Albanian (see Breu 2011: 54, n. 39). This language, in addition to masculine and feminine, has a neuter which hosts nouns denoting inanimates, both mass (e.g. djathé ‘cheese’) and count (e.g. krye ‘head’), as well as an alternating neuter of the Romanian kind (on which see $4.4-1), to which nouns like vend,-e, ‘place/-s’, mall,-ra ‘ware/-s’ are assigned, which take masculine agreement in the singular and feminine in the plural. Both neuters are productive, the former being fed by conversions (e.g. té ftohét ‘the cold’, té folurit ‘the [act of] speaking’), the latter by the productive suffix -im deriving abstract nouns (e.g. kujt-im, kujt-im-e ‘memory/memories, from kujtoj ‘to remember’).'° In what follows, I shall review (Chapters 3-4) the different kinds of gender system found in the Romance languages and dialects, so as to pave the way for reconstruction (Chapter 7). Furthermore, as a byproduct, this inventory will reveal data that are interesting from a typological perspective (Chapter 8) and will help to revise com- monplaces concerning gender in Romance (and in Standard Average European) such as the one that gender values are maximally three, or, even more spectacularly, the tacit assumption that the co-presence of two concurrent gender systems within one and the same language is (sparingly) observed only in far off areas of the planet but never in Europe. +5 Some of these facts are reported elsewhere in the literature (e.g. Matasovié 2004: 7of; Giurgea 2014: 56-8), with different analyses.Grammatical gender in Romance The mainstream In this chapter, I shall provide an overview of the basics of grammatical gender in Romance, starting from the major modern standard languages (although dialect data will be mentioned too, whenever appropriate, and will be in focus in §63.1.2-3.1.3 for reasons explained there). This overview is far from exhaustive: it only serves the purpose of laying the ground for Chapters 4-6, in which I shall show that the data observed in (the contemporary synchronic state of) the better-known standard languages grossly under-represent the array of structural variation found across Romance, and on which one can (and indeed must) capitalize for purposes of comparison and reconstruction." 3.4 Binary gender systems All modern standard Romance languages except Romanian are known to feature two complementary sets of controller nouns, triggering respectively feminine vs masculine gender agreement, as already seen in (1)-(2), Chapter 1 with nouns denoting human beings and further illustrated with inanimates in (1)-(2):? (@) a a/*o coluna (Pg,) b. la/**el_columna _(Sp., Cat.) c. la/*le colomne (Fr.) 4. la/*il_colonna _(It.) ‘the.RsG column(F)” (2) a. ofa pilar (Pg) . el /**lapilar —(Sp., Cat.) le/**la_pilier_—(Fr.) . ila pilastro (It.) ‘the.m.se pillar(m)’ ao ee * An hors-doeuvre of this variation will be offered in §53.1.2~3.13. However, although different from the mainstream type, the dialects discussed there do not provide crucial evidence to the diachronic reconstruction in Ch. 7. * Ro. o coloand ‘a.t column(t)'/un pilastru ‘a.m pillar(m)’ are parallel, but are omitted in (1)-(2) because the overall gender system is different (54.4.1). Gender from Latin to Romance. First edition. Michele Loporcaro © Michele Loporcaro 2018. First published 2018 by Oxford University Press34 Grammatical gender in Romance: The mainstream It is not rare for linguistic studies looking at Romance ‘at low resolution —that is, in a general typological context—to assume that this represents ‘Romance; full stop. Although we shall see (starting with §3.1.2 and in the subsequent chapters) that this is an undue oversimplification, it is surely appropriate for us to begin (in $3.1.1) with a succinct illustration of the majority pattern. 3.11 The majority type: parallel binary gender systems In all the languages exemplified in (1)-(2), the gender system is parallel, in Corbett’s (ag91: 155) sense, in that the masculine vs feminine contrast is marked in the plural just as in the singular, provided that the agreement targets’ inflection displays a four- cell/four-form-paradigm (see Loporcaro 2on1d: 331). This is exemplified with definite articles and class one adjectives in (3)-(4): (@) a.as boas/**bons _—raparigas_(Pg,) b. las buenas/**buenos chicas (Sp.) c. les bones/*bons noies (Cat) d. les bonnes/**bons filles (Fr) ele brave/*bravi ragazze _—_(It.) good:npL/M.pL — girl(r):pL £ bun-e/**bun-i (Ro.) girl(r)-PL=DERRPL — good-RPL/M.PL ‘the good girls’ (4) a. os bons/*boas —rapazes(Pg,) b. los buenos/**buenas chicos _(Sp.) «. els bons/**bones _nois (Cat.) d. les bons/**bonnes garsons__(Fr.) ei bravi/*brave —ragazzi_—_(It.) DERM.PL good:M.pL/:ePL — girl(r):pL f. baat: bun-i/bun-e (Ro,) boy(M)-PL=DER.M.PL good-M.PL/-FPL ‘the good boys’ Another trait that characterizes all the major standard languages (although for Romanian some further provisos have to be made, see §4.4.1.2) is that, of the two values of the gender category, masculine is the syntactically unmarked one, systematically occurring on agreement targets in default contexts. Different defaults may behave differently in richer systems, but they all converge on the masculine in the binary Romance systems considered here. Take for instance past participle agreement with DO clitics, which still occurs in Catalan, French, and Italian, as exemplified with feminine singular agreement in (5):° > In some varieties of spoken French, non-agreeing mis may occur in (sb) (see Loporcaro 2010b: 161), while in Catalan there seems to be a morphosyntactic gradient to the effect that feminine singular clitics trigger agreement more consistently than feminine plural ones, and the latter more consistently than masculine plural ones (see Loporcaro 20nd: 356f., with further references).3.1 Binary gender systems 35 (5) a. (La noi-a no [T=hem vist-a/**vist (Cat) DERF-SG girl(r)-s¢ NEG DO3rsG=have.prs.1PL seen-rsc/seen(M.s¢] “(the girl) we haven't seen her’ b. (sa voiture) Jean I'=a mise/**mis (Fr) 38G-F.SG_car(F) John DO3rsG=have.PRs.3sG putPTPr/put.PTRM dans le garage into DEFM.sG garage(M) “(his [lit. the] car) John put it into the garage’ b(a casa) Tha pulit-a/* pulit-o (it) DEF-FSG house(r)-s¢_DO3rsG=have.Prs.3s¢ clean.prp-rsc/clean.PTeMSG Gianni John ‘(the flat/house) it’s John who has cleaned it up Inall these languages, lexical DOs do not (anymore) control agreement, which results in selection of the (unmarked) masculine singular form in this context:* (6) a no hem vist/**vist-a la noia (Cat) NEG have.PRS.PL see.PTP-M.SG/see.PTP-FSG DEF-RSG_girl(r)-sc “(the girl) we haventt seen her’ b. Jean a mis/**mise s-a voiture dans John have.prs.3sG put.pTP.M /put.PTRE 38G-FSG car(F) into le garage (Er) DERM.SG garage(m) ‘John put his [lit. the] car into the garage? c. Gianni ha pulit-o/"pulit-a La cas-a_(It.) John —_have.prs.3sG. clean.prp-M.sG/clean.PTP-F.SG DEF-RSG house(F)-s¢ ‘John has cleaned up the flat/house’ ‘The same goes for pronouns, to an extent. Thus, a pronominal clitic resuming a non- canonical controller (typically, a clause), is masculine in Spanish, French, and Italian:* Ole bin (que ibas a venir) (Sp.) b, jele savais (que tu viendrais) (Fr.) c. lo sapevo (che saresti venuto) _(It.) ‘knew you would come? * Again, this must be hedged with qualifications, as Balearic Catalan still preserves, at least variably, past participle agreement in this context, as do several dialects of southern Gallo-Romance and central- southern Italian, as well as, for Italian, an archaic-sounding variety of the modern standard language (see Loporcaro 1998: 79, 2010a: 228, 2016a: 806f.). ® Spanish data from Ferndndez-Soriano (1999: 1260). Portuguese has no clitic here: ew (**0) sabia que vinhas I knew you would come.36 Grammatical gender in Romance: The mainstream Catalan, on the contrary, has a dedicated neutral clitic ho here ((8a), contrasting with the masculine (8b), see Wheeler et al. 1999: 138),° that will be addressed in $4.2.3, where other dedicated neutral forms for non-clitic 3rd person pronouns will also be reviewed: (8) a. alga ho=deu saber somebody DO3N=must.3sG _know.INF ‘somebody must know it” b. alga el/*ho=deu condixer somebody DO3m.sc/DO3N=must.3sG know.INF ‘somebody must know him’ With adjectives, agreement with non-canonical controllers takes the form of the masculine singular in all the Romance languages except those discussed in $$4.3.3, 4.5.2, 5.3, and 6.3.1 (in the French example, one sees the (3G) masculine default form for the subject clitic too):” (9) aé bonit-o andar ao mar (Pg.) b. es bonit-o ir al mar (Sp.) c é& bell anar ala mar (Cat.) dé bello andare al mare (it) be.PRs.3sG nice:M.sG go.INF to-the sea(m) e il est bon daller ala = mer (Fr.) SUBJ.CLIT3M.SG be.PRS3SG good.M.sG go.INF to-the sea(F) ‘it’s nice/good to go to the seaside’ Selection of the masculine singular also occurs in Italian, French, and Spanish in another default context, when the clitic resumes a (nominal/adjectival) predicate, rather than an argument:* (10) a. es guapa. Lo/**La es (Sp) ‘(She) is beautiful. She is? b. Jeanne est son amie. Elle le/*la sera toujours (Fr) ‘Jeanne is his friend, She always will be? ¢. Maria @ molto alta: lo/**la é sin da bambina (at.) “Maria is very tall. She has been since she was a child’ © ‘The term ‘neutral’ is used here in Corbett’ (1991: 159) sense (see $4.33 below). ” This goes for Romanian too (see (54), Ch. 4). On the other hand, some of the varieties discussed in CChs. 4~6 have a non-masculine (neuter) form for this function, be ita ‘neutral’ form (as in Sts. bi ‘nice[w];, (8c), Ch. 4) only occurring in such contexts, or a default one, also selected for agreement with neuter nouns: see (118)-(123), Ch. 4 for Central Marchigiano and (12)-(20), Ch. 5 for Central Asturian. * Again, Portuguese has no clitic here: Marilia é formosa. Sempre (**0) foi ‘Marilia is beautiful. She always was.’ On Spanish, see Ferndndez-Soriano (1999: 1260), Ambadiang (1999: 4907). Romansh has been losing the propredicate clitic over time. This can be omitted today in Sursilvan and is not even an option in contemporary Engadinian, while the old language had it (Linder 1987: 124f; example from the sixteenth- century Psalms by Durich Chiampel, ed. Ulrich 1906: 287):3.1 Binary gender systems 37 As seen in (10), the propredicate clitic is masculine singular even if the agreement controller (and, as a consequence, the predicate) is feminine? Catalan, on the other hand (Espinal 2013: 66), displays the neuter clitic form, see in (8a), for pronominalizing nominal predicates regardless of their gender: (11) en PauGasol és alt: ho=és des que PG. be.prs3sc tall(m)[sc] 3n=beprs.3sc_ since era una criatura (Cat.) was a child “Pau Gasol is tall: he has been since he was a child? Masculine agreement is also the default option in gender resolution contexts, although here there are language-specific subtleties—including, generally, the possibility for the predicate to agree in gender with the conjunct occurring closer to it in linear order:"° (a2) a. le rideau et la fenétre DERM.sG curtain(M).s¢ and DERESG window(r).sa sont ouverts/**ouvertes (Fr.) be.pRs.3PL open.M.PL/open.RPL ‘the curtain and the window are oper’ b. a janel-a e€ 0 purtio esto peF:rSG window(r)-sc and the. gate(m):sc be.3PL abert-os/**abert-as (Pg.) open-M.PL/open-FPL cla finestr-a e il cancell-o sono DEF:RSG window(F)-sc and the. gate(m)-s¢ be.3PL apert-i/**apert-e (It.) open-M.PL/open-FPL ‘the window and the gate are open’ ‘As shown in (12), the adjective predicated of two singular conjuncts of diverging gender is masculine plural, and the same goes for other agreement targets, in all Romance languages except Romanian (whose resolution rules will be addressed separately in $4.4.1.5):" () Ans dysch, schitisch Christ (...] seis. [...] Bug Ig sun tous tell whether you Christ... are.2sc 1 3MSG am “Tell us whether you're the Christ? ‘Tam ° ‘There are a few regional varieties of North-Western Italian (Spezzino, Parmigiano, Vogherese, and pethaps others) in which the cltic agrees with the (final) subject in this context, probably favoured by its conflation with the (homophonous) subject clitic: e.g. stanca, la é (tired) she is’ (compare Stl. stanca, lo é where the propredicate clitic is invariable). This is an under-researched phenomenon, sometimes ascribed loosely to ‘Northern Italian’ (as in Cardinaletti 2009: 43, n.17, based ona p.c. by R. Alessandro), but in fact limited to (part of) the North-West (see Setti 2013, discussing La Spezia local Italian, and Dachille 2017: 23). 2° This option was already there in Latin, whereas the selection of default masculine under resolution is a Romance innovation, replacing the neuter (see (14)-(17), Ch. 2). 1" The Spanish example is from Roca (1989: 12).38 Grammatical gender in Romance: The mainstream (3) aba ciudad oy ad puebl-o (Sp.) DEF-FSG city(F)[sc] and DERMsG_ village(m)-sc los/*las=visitamos en autocar DO3MPL/EPL=visit:PRETIPL in coach b. ba citta e il paes-e (it.) DEF-FSG city(F)[sc] and DERM.sG_ village(M)-sc i/*le=abb-iamo visitat-i/**-e in pullman DO.3M.PL/E.PL=have.PRS-1PL_visited-M.PL/-RPL in coach ‘the city and the town, we visited them by coach’ ‘This indicates the default status of the masculine gender value, while feminine plural agreement is specified positively throughout Romance (except in Romanian) and is selected only when both conjuncts are feminine and none denotes a male animate being, since in the latter case a semantic rule triggers masculine agreement, as exemplified with Spanish and Italian in (14) (of course, the judgements reported presuppose that persona in (14a), media naranja in (14b), and sentinella in (14c) all denote males; the judgements would differ if, for example, in (14b-c) homosexual couples were involved): (14) a. est-a person-a y su mujer (Sp.) DEM.PROX-F.SG person(F)-sc and his wife(r)[sc] son muy fe-os/**fe-as be.prs.3pL very ugly-M.PL/-RPL ‘this person and his wife are very ugly’ b. es-a tia y su_ medi-a—naranj-a DEM.NONPROX-RSG person(F)-sG and his half-rsc orange(s)-sc estan loc-os/**loc-as be.PRS.3PL_crazy-M.PL/-F.PL ‘this woman and her lover/partner are crazy’ c ba sentinell-a e su-a mogli-e (It.) DEF-ESG sentinel(r)-sc and Poss.3sG-RSG _wife(F)-sG sono partit-i/*-e be.prs.3PL__ left-M.PL/F.PL ‘the sentinel and his wife have left’ Summing up on this point, the resolution rules obtaining in most Romance varieties are the following: (as) GENDER RESOLUTION IN ROMANCE (ITALIAN, FRENCH, SPANISH, PORTUGUESE, Bre.): a. ifall conjuncts are feminine = feminine plural b. ifone conjunct denotes a male animate > masculine plural c. elsewhere > masculine plural3.1 Binary gender systems 39 Viewed diachronically, (15b) is a successor of the analogous rule (14c), Chapter 2, obtaining in Latin, while the default status of the masculine ((15¢)) is a Romance innovation with respect to Latin, where neuter used to take up this role (see (14d), Ch. 2). In most dialects whose ‘roofing’ standard languages (Dachsprachen) are the ones exemplified so far, grammatical gender works in exactly the same way as shown for the respective standard varieties. As an example, take Logudorese Sardinian, whose binary gender system is schematized in (16):'* (16) det [Noun | Adj s-u_| yadd-u | mann-u | | class II, pl. -as “them big-m.sc horse(M)-sG” masculine su |yan-e | mann-w ‘them big-m.sc dog(m)-se” class III, pl. -es ieee (eee | een ‘the.F big-F.sG cross(F)-sG” feminine sa | yraB-a | mann-a | | class I, pl. -as “the.r big-F.s¢ goat()-sc” This also exemplifies a situation that is widespread in Romance, viz. the lack of a one- to-one correspondence between gender and inflectional class: the three inflectional classes in (16) do not correspond directly to the two gender agreement options high- lighted by the boxes around the determiner and the adjective. From the above, it is clear that, on the whole, Romance has no general overt gender marking: this is why the many accounts of the relationship of gender and noun inflection which talk about ‘gender markers’ on nouns—as already exemplified in $1.2, commenting on Lloret and Viaplana (1997: 179)—are generally questionable. ‘The Logudorese data in (17)-(19) illustrate the occurrence of masculine agreement in all the default contexts seen above for the major standard languages in (6)-(7), (9), and (12). Thus, masculine singular forms are selected for lack of agreement ((17b)): (7) asa dorms l-app-> Pulizd-a/**Pulizd-u DEF-ESG house(F).sc DO3r.sG=have.prs-isG clean.pTp-rsc/clean.PTP-M.SG “(the flat/house) I have cleaned it up’ b. app-o Buli:d-w/**Buli:d-a za Boma have.prs-1sG_clean.pTP-M.sG/clean.PTP-RSG DEF-FSG _house(F).sG ‘Thave cleaned up the flat/house’ Likewise, the masculine singular clitic Iu is used to pronominalize ((18a)), and masculine singular inflections to signal agreement with ((18b)), clausal controllers:'* 1 The data in (16)-(19) stem from the Western Logudorese dialect of Bonorva (province of Sassari). > Sardinian, on the other hand, has no propredicate clitic, ike Portuguese (n. 8) and contrary to Italian, Spanish, and French: (i) mangedda est alta meda| fi gol Sar yanno vi ppittsinn-a M bers.3sc tall-rsc very beimpr3s¢ so since when be1mPr3sc young-rsG “Mariangelais very tall. She has been since she was a child.”40 Grammatical gender in Romance: The mainstream (8) a. a bbislu=nazr-o yi no endz-o indeed I03=DO3m.sc=tell.prs-isc that NEG come.PRS-1SG ‘Til tell him/her that 'm not coming? b. el bell-u ann-airé a=ss-u mazr-€ be.PRS.3SG nice-M.SG gO-INF t0=DEF-M.SG_sea(M)-SG ‘it’s nice to go to the seaside’ Masculine agreement also occurs, as in the languages seen in (12), in gender resolution contexts: (9) s-u bbalkoin-e ef z-a gann-a = zun DEF-M.sG window(M)-sG and DEF-RSG door(r)-sG be.PRS.3PL abbélt-oz0/**abbélt-aza open-M.PL/open-FPL ‘the window and the door are open’ Reviewing most other Romance local dialects (and/or ‘minor’ standardized languages) would lead to the same conclusion and bring in no novelty: see for example ‘Trumper’s (2014) account of gender assignment in the Veneto, showing that Venetian, Paduan, etc. have a binary masculine/feminine contrast, masculine default assignment, etc.; or Dubert Garcia's (2010) discussion of (masculine/feminine) gender assignment in Galician, and so on. Thus, in the following, we shall discuss only the dialects whose gender systems diverge significantly from that of their respective roofing languages. Such cases of divergence sometimes also occur in dialects with a binary gender contrast: for instance, at least one dialect of Apulia (considered in (8)-(11), Ch. 8) has developed a subgender distinction within the masculine (contrasting in turn with the feminine). More often, however, binary systems have undergone reduction rather than complexification, as shown in §3.1.2. 3.12. Binary convergent systems While a binary contrast is the minimum for a morphosyntactic feature to be active in a given language, the parallel systems described in §3.1.1 are not the minimal conceivable ones, in terms of the distinctions available. A logically possible option with still fewer distinctions overall is a convergent gender system (in Corbett’s 1991: 155 terms), in which the contrast is found in the singular, but not in the plural (the reverse would be a violation of Greenberg's 1966: 95 universal 37). This kind of gender system indeed occurs in several Romance varieties, although in none of the standard languages (which is why this section focuses on dialects, unlike the rest of the present chapter). Dwelling a while on them is also justified due to a lack of previous studies on Romance convergent gender systems. Since from now on I will refer to local dialects—even from small villages—maps will be provided, for readers to orient them- selves, starting with Map 1, at the end of this chapter, which gives a preliminary overview, to be then made more detailed with the subsequent ones, as discussion proceeds.3.1 Binary gender systems 41 ‘Among the major languages, French is the one which has come closest to having a convergent system, since most agreement targets which preserve a gender distinction display syncretism in the plural, ultimately due to the effects of sound change: (20) a. DEF = DO dlitic b. ‘this’ c. ‘my’ 8G PL SG PL sG BL, Mm | lo 89 mo lia le(z) 7 se(z) as me(z) Adjectives and participles mostly do not inflect for gender, but agreement on a handful of (subclasses of) irregular adjectives and participles (see e.g. Bonami and Boyé 2005: 79-81; Kilani-Schoch and Dressler 2005: 145f,) still preserves a masculine vs feminine contrast in the plural:'* a ' , ‘beautiful’ ——_b. ‘good’ «<. ‘taken’ d. ‘opened’ so] PL so | PL so | PL so | mL m| bo | bo(z) bs | ba(z) pyi uvex F [bel | bel(z) bon | bon(z)| pyiz uvext For the purposes of the present discussion it is crucial that a contrast be maintained in at least (one IC of) one part of speech. The issue of uniformity vs non-uniformity in the formal encoding of gender values across different types of target will be addressed in (27), Chapter 5. Still more advanced towards full gender neutralization in the plural are Northern Italian dialects such as Milanese, where all determiners (articles, demonstratives, possessives), personal pronouns, and pronominal clitics, as well as the overwhelming majority of adjective ICs, do not contrast gender in the plural (see Beretta 1980: 62-8, 132-453 Nicoli 1983: 87f., 115-20, 174): (22) a. DEF b. ‘that’ ¢. DOclitic 4. ‘your’ ¢. ‘beautiful’ sc Jet] [so] m] [sc]e] [sc ]et] [so | mel el 1 b bel ae ki |. i. Sat bei F | la kela la toa bela 4 As discussed in Loporcaro (20nd: 350), itis open to discussion whether the inflectional paradigm must still be analysed as a four-cell one, given the uncertain status of inflectional number marking, which is overtly preserved only in liaison contexts. In fact, many analyses regard liaison consonants as epenthetic (eg. Kilani-Schoch and Dressler 2005). Anyway for an adjective like beau ((21a)) one still has to specify that [2] may occur after some instances of [bo] (plural) but not after some other (singular), which implies posit- ing distinct cells for singular vs plural. An even clearer case is provided by irregular adjectives such as moral ‘moral; where the M.PL. moraux [moxo] is categorically distinct (independently from liaison) from both the M.s¢ [moval] and the r¢/et. (morale(s)), homophonous with the w.sc apart from liaison in the plural.42 Grammatical gender in Romance: The mainstream Just a few adjectives (Beretta 1980: 66f. mentions only those ending in -é: and in a nasalized vowel)" preserve the contrast ((23a-c)) and so—combined with the classes exemplified in (22)—guarantee that we posit a four-cell paradigm for Milanese gender/number agreement: (23) a. ‘Spanish’ b. ‘thin’. ‘good’ d.‘two’ —_e.‘three’ sc] PL sco | pt] [ so | pL PL PL m|spané: spand:| [fir fi: | [ba: ba: | dy: tris F |spanola|spanol| fina] fin | [bona] bon | |do tre As seen in (23d-e), the numerals ‘two’ and ‘three’ also contrast gender (Beretta 1980: 96; Nicoli 1983: 201), although they have inherent plural number and thus no four-cell paradigm. ‘Thus, should the plurals in (23a-b) also become levelled, only the lower numerals would remain, which would in that case display gender overdifferentiation.’® Dia- chronically, this near-neutralization in the plural is due, as in French, to sound change, which has deleted all final unstressed vowels except -a, so that Proto-Romance *boini/-e ‘good.m.PL/r.L’ could not be kept distinct, contrary to Tuscan bwo:ni/-e. As a matter of fact, several dialects from this area failed to establish a convergent system through phonetically irregular reintroduction of plural endings which would have been deleted through regular sound change. This was the case for example in Cremonese, where the same sound change has occurred (e.g, le¢ ‘read.prs.3sc’ < LEGIT, pel ‘skin’ < PELLE(M), ‘pais‘peace’ < PacE(M)) but feminine plural adjectives have an e-ending: gras/grasal grase ‘thick.M.sG/PL//esG//R.PL’ (Rossini 1975: 25)."” That this feminine plural ending has not been preserved but has been restored is all the more clear in those dialects of Emilia- Romagna which have -i rather than -e in this function (see Rohlfs 1966-69: 2.26, 77). ‘These examples show that there is no deterministic impact of sound change on morphosyntax: sound change should have resulted in convergent systems throughout Northern Italo-Romance, but this is mostly not the case. Conversely, even sound changes with less radical an impact on morphology than final vowel deletion may lead to the establishment of convergent systems, as was the case in Western and North-Eastern Sicilian and Southern Calabrian, for instance (see Map 2, at the end of this chapter).’* In these dialects, final unstressed mid vowels were raised, so that only fia u/ occur after stress. This results in full neutralization of gender marking in the plural inflections of determiners, adjectives, and all other agreement targets, as * Nicoli (1983: 119) adds Suzr ‘rich.M.sG=RPL’ vs Sura BSG vs Suri M.PL, which goes back to two human- denoting nouns (usr ‘lord; Sura lady’), conflated into one adjectival paradigm. 26 See $$4.3.2 and 6.3.2 for discussion of gender overdifferentiation in lower numerals. 1” Under the alternative view upheld e.g. by Zérner (1995), Maiden (1996) and others, final -e in grose goes back—via s-vocalization and monophthongization—to -as rather than to -ak, which would explain its resistence to apocope (a subtle morphological counterargument is developed by Barbato 2010). © Much more rarely, such convergent systems arise via morphological contact-induced change (see $83.2)3.1 Binary gender systems 43 exemplified with a comparison of the paradigm of a class one adjective in Southern Calabrian (dialect of Reggio Calabria, see Falcone 1976: 66-8) and Standard Italian: (24) a. Reggino b. Italian sc PL sG PL M | bbo:nu buono buoni ‘good’ F | bbo:na ie buona buone In Reggino, neither the determiner nor the adjective (nor any other target) can distin- guish, in the plural, i ka:ni (sg. u kazni ‘the.m dog(m)’) from i katsi (sg. a kazsa ‘the. house()’). All over the southern Italian area in which PRom final /e/ has merged with Jil, the masculine vs feminine contrast in the plural is rescued if original final /i/ has caused metaphony, prior to /e/ raising, This is the case in central-northern Calabria, and northern Salento, as exemplified with the adjective paradigms from the dialects of Castrovillari (province of Cosenza; see Pace 1993-94: 34) and Francavilla Fontana (province of Brindisi; see Ribezzo 1912: 27-8; Calabrese 1984-85: 13), respectively, in (25)-(26): (25) a. Castrovillarese b. Francavillese sc PL sG PL m_| bbu:nu bbu:ni | friddu friddi on ‘good’ ‘cold F | bbo:na bbo:ni fredda freddi However, the occurrence of metaphonic alternations in a given dialect does not suffice to guarantee the maintenance of parallel gender marking, as demonstrated by inspection of Sicilian. Most of the island's dialects (with the exception of two areas, one cut- ting the central part of Sicily from north to south, and the other in the south-east: see Loporcaro 2013: 161f.) has no metaphonic alternation, and thus a convergent system. like (24a) (e.g. Urban Siracusano bba:nu, -a, -1‘good:M.sG, -F.SG, -PL’; diachronically, this neutralization in the plural is due, as in French and Milanese, to sound change affecting the inflectional ending). But even in dialects that do display metaphony, such as Ragusano (in south-eastern Sicily, see Piccitto 1941: 30f3 Maiden 1991: 163), ‘in nes- sun caso il plurale degli aggettivi femminili si distingue da quello dei maschili’ [‘in no case does the plural of feminine contrast with that of masculine adjectives’], as the metaphonic diphthong has ousted the original monophthong in the feminine plural: (26) Ragusano sc PL sc PL m | bbwo:nu ‘good’ | apjertu bbworni apjetti ‘open’ F | bbo:na apetta44 Grammatical gender in Romance: The mainstream ‘Thus, here too, as in Reggino, both i pe:jsi (sg. a peitsa ‘the.F stone(F)’) and i pjezri (sg. u petri ‘the.m foot(m)’) take identical agreement morphs on all targets. This situation is found generally across Sicilian dialects with metaphony (see Assenza and De Angelis 2013: 482; De Angelis 2014: 47). For instance, the dialect of Mistretta (province of Messina, near the northern coast, AIS pt. 826) has metaphony (e.g. wéssira ‘kernels’ < “ossora, with diphthongization triggered by posttonic [i], in free variation with inherited assa; see Sornicola 2010: 559), determiners and adjectives inflecting just as in Ragusano: e.g. rwossu ‘big.M.sG;, rassa ‘big.F.sG, rwossi ‘big.PL’ (i.e. M = F; see AIS 1.184). A similar system occurs in the northern coastal strip of Sardinia (in Sassarese and Gallurese, see §8.3.2, (20) and (23) for illustration) and in adjacent southern Corsica, where neither metaphonic nor any other kind of root vowel alternation occurs. This is exemplified with southern Corsican (dialect of Sarténa, see Paganelli 1976: 39f Durand 2003: 197) in (27): (7) SINGULAR PLURAL ™ [un om-u brav-w/bon-u omin-i brav-i/bon-i INDF.MSG man(M)-s¢_kind-M.sG/good-m.sc | man(m)-pL_—_kind/good-px ‘a good/kind man’ “good/kind men’ u mur-u. lisci-u i muri lisc-i DEF.M.SG wall(m)-sG __ smooth-m.s¢ DEF.PL_wall(at)-PL smooth-PL ‘the smooth wall’ ‘the smooth walls’ y [una donna brav-a/bon-a donn-i brav-i/bon-i INDF-F.sG woman(r)-sckind-r.sc/good-r.s¢_| woman(r)-pL___kind/good-P. ‘a good/kind woman ‘good/kind woman’ a facciat-a_lisci-a i facciat-i _lisc-i DEF.F.SG facade(F)-s¢_smooth-F.s6 per.pL. facade(r)-pL smooth-PL. ‘the smooth facade’ ‘the smooth facades’ Corsican, Sassarese, and Gallurese, like southern Calabrian and Western and North- Eastern Sicilian, are instances of reduction from parallel to convergent via regular sound change, which can often be traced in diatopic variation to this day. Thus, for instance, Northern Corsican still preserves the previous stage (parallel gender marking; see Faraoni and Loporcaro 2016): (28) a. Northern Corsican > b. Southern Corsican 8G PL SG PL m|-u |] i u i Fl/-a |—————_| -e -a As a consequence, these convergent systems are stable and do not show variation. ‘The situation exemplified in (26) with Ragusano is different, since there the change3.1 Binary gender systems 45 was analogical (i.e. morphological), with an earlier feminine plural *bbo:ni replaced by its metaphonic competitor, homophonous with the masculine plural. While for Ragusano this is described as categorical by Piccitto, for other dialects a transitional stage has been observed. For some varieties of northern Salento, which originally all displayed the pattern in (24b), Mancarella (1970: 120) reports on-going lexical diffu- sion of the merger in the plural, where the originally masculine form is now variably used for the feminine too. Thus, in the dialect of Sava (province of Taranto), one finds in the feminine plural li mani freddilfriddi ‘the cold hands(r); li jammi grossilgrwessi ‘the big legs(r): Here, the article form li is unmarked for gender, whereas for the adjective, a dedicated feminine form (freddi, grossi) occurs in free variation with the previously masculine—and now unmarked—one (friddi, grwessi).!” Generalization to mark plural of the formerly masculine form is the most widespread pattern in the extreme south area (exemplified for the Northern Salentino dialect of Latiano in (29a)), while extension to mark plural of the formerly r.pt form of the adjective is reported by Urgese (2003: 65, n. 2) for the nearby Northern Salentino dialect of Manduria (29b); both are in the province of Brindisi, where PRom -E > -i as in Sicilian and Southern Calabrian so that all non-metaphonic agreement targets converge in the plural (e.g. li méskuli/fémmini ‘the males/females, Urgese 2003: 50): (29) a. dialect of Latiano (Brindisi) _b. dialect of Manduria (Brindisi) uso [rsa] pe mse | ese | PL gloss ciimu | ce:na | ci:ni ciimu | cena |cemni | ‘full friddu | fredda | friddi friddu | fredda | freddi | ‘cold’ frisku | freska | friski frisku | freska | freski | ‘cool’ kurtu | korta | kurti kurtu | korta’ | korti | ‘short’ purty | pporra | puri ppurru | ppoira | ppo:ri | ‘black? Tussu Tossa Tussi Tussu Tossa rossi ‘red’ North of the areas where /e/ > /i/ occurred, final vowels merged into /a/ so that, again, metaphonic alternations and/or other formal distinctions on determiners may avoid gender neutralization in the plural. Occasionally, in this area too, morphological paradigm levelling resulted in neutralization, as in the Abruzzian dialects of Teramo and Casalincontrada (province of Chieti, see Map 2), described by De Lollis (1890- 92:194):see Teramano li kizna/fémmana ‘the.PL dogs(M)/women(®) jtimmanalfémmana bbilla ‘beautiful.p men(m)/women(r)’ (see discussion in Maiden 1991: 173). This kind of convergent system may be more widespread in the coastal Adriatic area of Abruzzi » Apparently, this replacement is favoured by certain syntactic contexts, as the unmarked form is reported as strongly preferred in predicate position: sti fémmmini so gerwessillljenti ‘these women are fat! slow; li vest so livengi ‘the dresses are long’ (though see the discussion in Maiden 1991: 172).46 Grammatical gender in Romance: The mainstream delimited in Map 3 in Chapter 4 and $4.5 below, an area which is very diversified, the morphosyntax of whose dialects still awaits closer investigation. For instance, the dialects of Castelli (province of Teramo, AIS pt. 618) and Fara San Martino (province of Chieti, AIS pt. 648; see also the VIVALDI archive data), spoken near the two varieties with convergent systems just mentioned, mark the M vs F contrast in articles (li kizna ‘the.m.pL dogs(m)’ vs la kaessa Castelli/kaisa Fara ‘the.r.pt houses(r)’) and adjectives with metaphonic alternation (bbu:na ‘good.m.pt’ vs bbaina ‘good.r.pt’), and thus display a binary parallel system like those in $3.1, as shown on Map 2. In central Italo-Romance, where final unstressed mid vs high vowels did not generally merge, there is a—nowadays discontinuous—area stretching from Arcevia (in the province of Ancona), to the north-east, down to Montalto di Castro, Vetralla, and Barbarano Romano (in the province of Viterbo), to the south-west (see Merlo 1920: 234-5; Loporcaro and Paciaroni, 2016: 240 as well as Map 2)—where the reverse change with respect to the raising considered above took place. In some dialects, the merger spares at least some determiners and/or the contrast is rescued by root vowel alternation, historically caused by metaphony, as exemplifed for the dialect of Certopiano di Arcevia (province of Ancona) in (30) (after Crocioni 1906: 31-2, 53):2° (30) a. DEE ». ‘this’ (only adnominal) c. ‘this’ (also pronominal) d. ‘our(s)” sé] rt] [sc |e sé | pL SG PL mt fi sto. | sti kowisto | kwiste nwostro | nwostre fla [te | [sta | ste kwesta | kweste nostra _| nostre As seen in (30c-d), class one affixal inflections are merged, but metaphonic root vowel alternation signals gender in the plural as well, whereas light (adnominal) proximal demonstratives ((3ob)) andarticles ((30a);seee.g. icummiente'the.M.pLmonasteries(M)’ vs le rame ‘the.r.pL branches(r), Crocioni 1936: 27), being unstressed, preserve the contrast in the final vowel which is treated as though it were pre-tonic.”* 3.13. From parallel to convergent and back to a parallel gender system In the area where /i/ > /e/ has occurred, convergent systems arise whenever determiners and pronouns, too, lose the contrast, and metaphony does not apply. This is the case in the part of this area that is west of the Tiber (in Umbria and northern Lazio). In the north-western half of Umbria, the change was undone in many dialects—especially urban ones, such as Perugino—under Tuscan influence (see Ugolini 1970: 477). Conversely, it had not become established in Orvieto by the Middle Ages (see Bianconi 1962: 102), where it penetrated later on (e.g. e nostre maestre ‘DEF.PL our masters(M); € vostre denare ‘DEF.PL your money(M)’ in an Orvietano text from 1537; 2 This of course does not mean that the contrast is signalled everywhere, but crucially, its, at least on (some inflectional classes of) some lexical categories. This is what distinguishes syncretism from neutralization (see Baerman et al. 2005: 2, 32), since in the latter no lexical category ever signals the contrast. 2" A similar situation is reported for the Marchigiano dialect of Montelago di Sassoferrato (province of Ancona) by Balducci (1986: 259).3.1 Binary gender systems 47 see Palermo 1994: 77f., 212). Modern Orvietano has a convergent system, with full identity in plural determiners (Je ka:ne ‘the dogs(m)’ = le koatte ‘the clutches(r)’, G. Moretti 1987: 133), adjectives (bo:no/-a/-e ‘good.M.sc/r.sG/PL’ AIS 4.710, pt. 583 and Mattesini and Ugoccioni 1992: 79), and all the other agreement targets.”” Consider (31), from the dialect of Bolsena (province of Viterbo; see Casaccia and ‘Tamburini 2005: 17-19): (G1) a. so itte ko le kuggi:n-e mit-e be.prs.3PL gone-pL with DEF:PL cousin(M/r)-PL 18G-PL ‘they (male or female) went with my cousins (male, female, or mixed)’ b. so stait-e — ess-e be.prs.3PL been-PL 3-PL ‘it’s been them (male, female, or mixed)’ Here the article le, the pronoun esse, the adnominal possessive mize and the partici- pial agreement (-e) all signal plural number, not gender. The merger also affects noun inflection, as seen in kuggi:ne (contrast Standard Italian cugini M vs cugine F); le mi fiije is either ‘my sons’ or ‘my daughters, and so on. Within such a convergent system, there is of course no structural room for more than two gender values (unlike in parallel systems, to be discussed in $$4.4-4.5). Consider for instance the following data, from the dialect of Barbarano Romano (province of Viterbo), whose convergent system is exemplified in (32): (32) SINGULAR PLURAL ‘a beautiful boy’ //‘those/the beautiful boys’ Mlunber —_regattso ; met eee kwille bbelle regattse | ‘a beautiful gir!’ //‘those/the beautiful girls nna bbella _regattsa In Barbaranese, nouns inflecting like Italian braccio,-a ‘arm,-s, which select alternating agreement in the standard, have no choice but to merge with masculines for gender agreement, though maintaining, at least variably, a distinctive a-inflection in the plural, which however is just relevant for IC, not for gender, synchronically: (33) se PL er dett-o le dest-a/-e ‘the finger’ er vaik-o le vark-a/-e ‘the grain/fruit/grape’ elloss-o long-o ell 2ss-a/-e long-e ‘the long bone’ The same system is observed for other rural Viterbese varieties spoken south, west, and north of Viterbo: see De Montarone (2013: 249) on the dialect of Montefiascone; I gatto/fasa:lo ‘the cat/bean, plural le gatte/faga:le (see also AIS 4.710, pt. 612, baine ‘good.pL’ M = F); and Blasi (1983: 4) on that of Tarquinia: I mi nonno/kazne ‘my grand- father/dog,, plural le mi nanne/kazne (see also AIS 1.184, pt. 630, grasse ‘big. PL} M = F). * Other nearby dialects, although merging final -i with -e on most targets, still preserve the gender contrast in the definite article: eg. in rural Perugino (in Magione, Tuoro, et.) izle ‘the. sons(Mt)’ # le fiotle ther daughters(o1)’ (G. Moretti 1973: 244, 300, 1987: 45).48 Grammatical gender in Romance: The mainstream Data for Acquapendente are available from AIS pt. 603 (1.184, bo:ne ‘good.PL M = F), data for Blera from Petroselli (2010: 319, 354, 403): e.g. le su fijje maskje ‘Der.pL his male.pL sons(m); le poke inkotte (literally) ‘Der.rt burnt.PL dumplings(m); a kind of gnocchi, sg. | prokko ‘the.m.sG dumpling(m); etc. ‘These dialects are very close to the (Florentine-based) standard language, with which they co-exist in the verbal repertoire, and, into the bargain, are exposed to the influence of Romanesco, too, which is also very similar to Florentine (having been tuscanized from the fifteenth century on) and has today a binary parallel system like Standard Italian (see (1)-(4)).”* Thus, in the local verbal repertoire, there is a smooth transition, rather than a sharp contrast, between the local dialect and the (Tuscan- based) standard language, which results in increasing convergence with Romanesco through on-going contact-induced change, including in the gender system. Consider modern urban Viterbese. Some grammars describe a parallel system for the contemporary dialect (e.g. Urbani 1999: 11-9): (34) sc PL 1 fijj-o/pre:t-e li fijj-e (mizi)/pre:t-e ‘the/my.m son(m)/priest(m)-sc/PL’ la fijj-a/donn-a_le fij-e (mize)/donn-e ‘the/my.r daughter(r)/woman(F)-sG/Pt’ ‘As seen in (34), the effects of the sound change /i/ > /e/ appear on masculine plural nouns, but not on determiners, so that gender agreement marking is unaffected. Other sources, though, report the masculine plural article le, rather than li, homophonous with the feminine: e.g. le kazne ‘the.pt dogs(m)’ in Galeotti and Nappo (2005: 45). This indicates a convergent gender system, which indeed gradually got established in Viterbo during the late Middle Ages. In fact, while according to Bianconi (1962: 102) the change is not observed in the medieval corpus he analysed, some examples do occur in the fourteenth century texts edited by Sgrilli (2003: 16) and analysed by Di Carlo (2015): (The examples in (35) are drawn from the Statuti della con- fraternita dei disciplinati di San Lorenzo, aD 1345.) (35) a. p(er) tutt-ieretici e scismatici, ke Dio l-e traia d’on(n)e e(r)ore e reduca=l-e al nome della s(an)c(t)a matre Ecclesia ‘for all heretics(m) and schismatics(m), may God take them-Pr out of all error(s) and bring them-p back to the name of the Holy Mother Church’ b, tutt-i li iudei, che le traga donne errore ‘all-m.Px the-m.PL Jews(M), may God take them-Pt out of all error(s)’ c. tutt-i li pagani, che Dio -e traga d’on(n)e errore ‘all-m.pL the-m.PL pagans(M), may God take them-PL out of all error(s)’ d. tutte q(ue)lle anime [...] conduca=l-e a vita eterna ‘all those-F.PL souls(F), may God bring them-P to eternal life’ 2 The gender system of Old Romanesco was more complex, featuring two alternating genders until the sixteenth century (see (77)-(79), Ch. 7). Ever since the Middle Ages, before being tuscanized, Romanesco has influenced Viterbese (see e.g. Ernst 1970: 51; Stussi 2003: 536), since Viterbo was for centuries under the temporal rule of the Papacy, and Rome was the centre of prestige. The influence has continued till today (see eg. Trifone 1992: 46-9, 81; Achille 2002: 530).3.1 Binary gender systems 49 Example (35d) exemplifies feminine plural agreement, which is stable on both the determiner (quelle) and the pronominal clitic (/e). However, in glossing the latter, the gender specification has been put in angled brackets (to signal optionality); this is in comparison with (35a-c), where clitics resuming masculine plural nouns are non- distinct from feminine /e, while agreement targets within the noun phrase still show an i-ending masculine plural form, distinct from the feminine. An in-depth analysis is needed, although from these preliminary results it seems as if the neutralization seen today in (31)-(33) may have started in the pronominal system, and then spread 50 as to make gender agreement fully convergent. Today’s urban Viterbese is sometimes reported not to show this neutralization (as seen in (34)), but there are varieties of the urban dialect that do. In particular, there is one part of town, viz. Pianoscarano, which, by the unanimous judgement of the locals, today preserves the most typical and conservative dialect. The dictionary by Petroselli (2009: 289), based on data collected with a farmer from Pianoscarano born in 1900, reports free variation between parallel and convergent gender agreement, as exemplified from one and the same entry (fijjo ‘son, child’) in (36), where distinctively masculine (-i) and convergent plural agreeing forms (-e) vary freely with masculine controllers: (36) a. le tu fijje, i tuoi figli, le tue figlie | le su fijje, m. e f. | fijje mie!, figli miei! | salute e ffijie maschje! (espr. di augurio a chi starnuta) [...] fijje ciuche guae ciuche, fijje granne guae granne (...] sémo tutte fijje de Ddio [‘your sons = your daughters | his/her sons = his/her daughters, M and F | my children! | bless- ing and may you have male children (i.e. bless you, addressing one who sneezes) (...] small children small problems, big children big problems (...] we are all God's children’]; moérti fiji portono pruvidénza {...] coli fiji ce vo. amére e ttimére | fiji e ppélli sporcano casa | li fijji sd ccéme li fidri: présto sammalano, presto ripijjano {'many children are an insurance (...] with children you need love and fear | children and chicken untidy your home | children are like flowers: they soon get ill and soon recover’). s Viterbese is now part of an area which, as shown in (31)-(32), has a categorically convergent system: the dialects of Barbarano Romano, Blera, Tarquinia, Acquapendente, Grotte di Castro, S. Lorenzo Nuovo, Montefiascone, and Bolsena (mentioned above) form an arc south, west, and north of Viterbo (see Map 2). The convergent system for this area is already documented in the AIS data with three data points, reflecting the competence of informants born around the middle of the nineteenth century: the informant for Acquapendente (pt. 603) was born in 1844, the informant for Tarquinia (pt. 630) in 1851, Montefiascone (pt. 612) in 1870 (Jaberg and Jud 1928: 139-42). Given this areal distribution, it seems a priori probable that, among the agreement options in free variation in (36), le (convergent) is the conservative one, and li (masculine plural) is an innovation. This is confirmed by the (admittedly few) data provided by Papanti’s (1875: 406) one-page translations of Boccaccio’s Decameron 1.9), whose Viterbese version displays no instances of distinct masculine vs feminine plural agreement: certe malféreente [sic] ‘some.p bandits(m); le tuorte dillaltre ‘the.PL50 Grammatical gender in Romance: The mainstream wrongs(m) of [= done to] other people’ le tuorte aricieute, chi md sud fatte ‘the.pL wrongs(M) received.P, which now are done.Pt’ (see sg. qualche tuorto aricitto ‘some wrong received.M.sc’), indistinct from le nuoce ‘the.PL nuts(F). The other versions collected by Papanti (1875: 387-96) for the nearby villages of Acquapendente, Grotte di Castro, and San Lorenzo Nuovo (in the province of Viterbo) show the same situation. Therefore, nothing speaks against the assumption that urban Viterbese in the mid-nineteenth century displayed a convergent system like the surrounding dialects,”* which have kept it unmodified until now ((31)-(33)), while in Viterbese free variation is reported for the dialect of the generation born around 1900 (see (36)). I carried out fieldwork in Pianoscarano in November 2014 with three informants (born between 1945 and 1970), whose answers are synthesized in (37) (glosses on controllers and agreement targets in (37a-b) are omitted, for reasons to be explained directly): (37) a. le/ste faso:le/forke ‘the/these beans/fireworks’ b. sti/*ste bbo:i/*-e so bbo:ni/*-e ‘these oxen are good” c. sti/*ste fijji/*-e so Céu:ki/*-e ‘these children(m)/sons(m) are small.M.PL’ d. ste/*sti fijje/*-i so ééuzke/*-i ‘these daughters(r) are small.F.PL” e. le/ste saréi¢ée so bboine/*-i__‘the/these.F.pt sausages(F) are good.F.PL” Comparison with (36) is revealing. Pianoscaranese (like all of urban Viterbese) must have had a fully convergent system at an earlier stage, which became variable in the competence of informants born around 1900 (see (36)) when masculine plural agreement (-i) was reintroduced due to contact pressure from Romanesco and the standard language. From (contact-induced) variation in (36), a functional contrast has developed, as exhibited in the competence of my informants, who retain plural endings which are not distinct from the feminine only on and with masculine nouns denoting inanimates ((37a)) like faioile or fozke, whereas -i for animates like 1 bo:(v)o/ fijjo ‘the. ox(m)/son(m)’ in (37b-c) has become categorical.* For animals and humans, thus, there is a sharp, sex-related, contrast, as exemplified by (37c) vs (374). The human feminine occurring in the latter example takes feminine plural agreement, in the usual way, just like an inanimate such as la sarciééa ‘the.F sausage(F)’ in (37e). ‘Thus, the [+animacy] contrast has served as an attractor, polarizing previous free variation and giving rise to a partially semantic system. In fact, the whole gender system has been reshaped, as illustrated in (38) with agreement exponents from the definite article and class one adjectives: > No information is available on the age of the data provider for that area, but Giovanni Papanti himself ‘was born in 1830, which affords a chronological anchoring point for his correspondents. Of course, this does not exclude that there may be still more conservative speakers preserving the earlier systems exemplified in (36). During a fieldwork session in Pianoscarano in April 2015, Miriam Di Carlo, whom I thank, was able to record the son of the informant whose competence is reflected in (36): apparently, that speaker still regards le with human masculine plurals as acceptable.3.1 Binary gender systems 51 (38) a. rural Viterbese/earlier Pianoscaranese > b. today’s Pianoscaranese 8G PL 86 1 om m[Iro To Wi | ier ie F {la/-a I la/-a (tee When le fijje for ‘the sons, still optionally available for the two-generation older Pianoscaranese in (36), ceased to be grammatical, the convergent system (still occurring, in the rural Viterbese of Barbarano, Montefiascone, etc., see (32)) has defini- tively become, again, a parallel system where a feminine (target and controller) gender (II) of the usual, non-semantically motivated, Romance (and Indo-European) type contrasts with a masculine gender (I). However, this masculine gender is strictly motivated semantically (as in, say, Tamil, Burushaski, or English), in a way unusual for Romance, since it exclusively hosts nouns denoting animate males.”* The rest of the noun lexemes which belonged to the masculine and the neuter in Proto-(Italo-) Romance (diachronically) and denote inanimate entities (synchronically) are now assigned to an alternating gender (III), which did not exist at the stage illustrated in (38a). This is a gender signalled on agreement targets by markers which are all syncretic with some other gender value—in this case, widely occurring across Romance (see (3b), (53b), (79b) etc., Ch. 4), with masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural.2” This provides a nice example of how contact-induced morphological and morphosyntactic change, affecting in this case both noun inflection and gender agreement, may cause complexification, not only simplification of the grammar. The latter is indeed more often the case cross-linguistically, as can also be observed in other instances of contact-induced change in the Romance gender system reviewed in $8.3 below. Enger (2011: 171) hedges this with qualifications based on inspection of contact- induced change in Scandinavian dialects, concluding that reduction is indeed found on the paradigmatic axis, although adding the caveat that ‘The idea of gender reduction in contact should be restricted to lexical gender’ and that, with respect to gender values in the system, ‘“Numerical reduction” and “simplification” are not necessarily synonymous. In Viterbese, as we have seen, paradigmatic complexity has also increased, as there has been an increase in the net number of gender values. Paradoxically enough, the earlier binary convergent system (38a) has become more complex, developing into the three-gender system (38b), due to contact pressure from another binary system, that of Standard Italian/Romanesco. This shows that the contrast between a parallel 2 On the semantic system of Tamil see Corbett (1991: 8-10, 202f, 269f.), (7), Ch. 8; on Burushaski see (4)-(6), Ch. 8. ‘This situation has been labelled variously in the literature, as one in which the number of controller genders exceeds that of target genders (Corbett’ 1991: 150-2), or as one in which the system includes a “dependent target gender’ (Corbett 1991: 164), the latter also labelled a ‘non-autonomous gender value’ (in Corbett 20: 459-60).52 Grammatical gender in Romance: The mainstream and a convergent system matters, as the mismatches in assignment between the two can lead to interference in bidialectal speakers and, eventually, to contact-induced change. To conclude, it is clear from the above that the systems reviewed here are further developments of the parallel type described in §3.1.. Hence, while interesting per se as an instance of a synchronically different structural option and of change along somewhat unusual paths, they will be of little help for the diachronic reconstruction of the Latin-Romance transition to be proposed in Chapter 7.° 3.2 Gender assignment rules ‘To round off this introduction to (the mainstream type of) Romance gender systems, some remarks on gender assignment are in order here. Following Corbett (1991), this will be done by addressing semantic rules (3.2.1), on the one hand, and formal rules (53.2.2), on the other. 3.2.1 Semantic rules In most Romance languages, nouns are assigned to either of the two genders exemplified in (1)-(2) above (and in (1)-(2), Chapter 1 for, respectively, inanimate and human referents). Such a binary system is trivially not semantically based, as shown by the fact that nouns denoting inanimate objects are distributed idiosyncratically over masculine and feminine, as illustrated in (1)(2) above with the near-synonymous Pg. coluna/pilar and their counterparts in other languages. ‘This is a general property of Indo-European languages, insofar as they have preserved gender distinctions ever since PIE (see Matasovié 2004: 200; Luraghi 2006: 105, and $2.3 above). The sole robust semantic regularity—as in all languages featuring a masculine/feminine contrast—is that nouns denoting male vs female humans tend to be respectively masculine vs feminine (see (1)-(2)), as do nouns denoting ‘familiar’ and/or domestic animals (mostly mammals), and many birds.” Thus, all Romance languages have a masculine/feminine pair corresponding functionally to Lat. EquUs/ EQUA ‘horse/mare’ (Pg. cavalo/égua, Sp. caballo/yegua, Cat. cavall/euga, Fr. cheval/ jument, It. cavallo/cavalla, Ro. cal/iapd) and this is true for several other animals, but exceptions and variation are rampant, even in this core domain of semantic assignment. For instance, the word for ‘fox’ has one fixed gender, feminine in Italian (la volpe), Portuguese (a raposa), Catalan (la guineu/guilla/rabosa) but masculine in French (le renard/goupil), whereas two words of different gender are available in Spanish (el zorro ‘fox'/la zorra ‘vixen, but also ‘slut’) and Romanian, where the masculine vulpoi(ul) “(the.m) male fox’ is derived from feminine vulpe(a). ‘This is idiosyncratic, and may © This explains, by the way, why I must renounce a full account of the Romance evidence for convergent systems. Northern Romance, from the Carrara-Fano line north- and westwards, where all final unstressed vowels except -a were deleted, is liable to hold further similar systems in store, although in many such varieties the gender contrast has been preserved or restored on at least some agreement targets. » Grammars provide extensive information on these facts: see e.g. Wheeler et al. (1999: 3-29), Perini (2002: 85-96), Ambadiang (1999: 4845-84), Grevisse and Goosse (1993: 705-75), Braescu et al. (2008: 65-9), Nedeleu (2o13c: 255-8), Serianni (2006: 11-31).3.2 Gender assignment rules 53 change over time, as was the case in Italian where Olt. la gatta ‘the cat(r)’ denoting animals of both sexes has changed to modern il gatto (M) (Serianni 2006: 129). For humans too, one comes across cases such as the word for ‘witness, which has either gender, depending on the sex of the referent in Spanish (el/la testigo), Catalan (el/la testimoni), Italian (il/la testimone), but is just masculine in Romanian (martor(ul)) and feminine in Portuguese (a testemunha).°° Sex-based assignment becomes excep- tionlessly regular with proper names. An asymmetry observed in all Romance languages is that the terms in (2) are used generically, to denote mixed sets of (1)-(2), as seen with a Spanish example in (39a) (Roca 1989: (39) a. sdlo tuvo un hijo, y le salié nifia ‘she only had one child(), and it was a girl(F)’ b. ‘sdlo tuvo una hija, y le salié nifto ‘she only had one daughter(r), and it was a boy(s)’ ‘The non-acceptability of (39b) shows that hija cannot be used generically, which is the same for many terms denoting humans and sex-differentiable animals across Romance:*! (40) Antonio y Pilar son hermanos/**hermanas Sp. ‘Antonio(m) and Pilar(®) are brothers [=siblings]/sisters’ b. Mihai si Liana sunt frafi/**surori Ro. “Mike(m) and Liana(r)are brothers [=siblings]/sisters’ ‘This is not general, however: for instance Sp. brujos ‘sorcerers’ cannot refer generically toa mixed set of brujas (‘witches’) y brujos (see Ambadiang 1999: 4862); likewise, It. stregoni cannot stand for streghe e stregoni.?? Although the predicative use of a masculine or feminine noun is not an instance of gender agreement (unlike the cross-linguistic examples of nouns as agreement targets reviewed in Corbett 2006: 47-9, or the Romance ones discussed here in (19), Ch. 5 and (50), Ch. 8)—and so, in the case that the arguments are conjuncts of different gender, as in (40), should not be confused with gender resolution—there are gender constraints on nouns used predicatively (or adpositionally) that are somewhat reminiscent of those on agreement. Consider the Italian phrases in (41): (41) a. due popoli fratelli/**sorelle It. ‘two brother peoples(m)’ b, due nazioni sorelle/**fratelli ‘two sister nations(F)” © ‘Epicene is the label used in the Graeco-Latin tradition (see Priscian, GL 2.141, Alifi 2006) for nouns with one fixed grammatical gender, independent of the referent’ sex. 3 See e.g. Lopes (1971: 67f), Villalva (2000: 228.) on the non-markedness of the masculine in compar- able pairs in Portuguese. > Generic use of the masculine (for both lexical denotation and agreement: see (12)-(13) on gender resolution) has been targeted by feminist critique and by official recommendations for non-sexist language usage: see eg. for French, Yaguello (1989, 1992); Baider and Yaguello (2007); for Italian, A. Sabatini (1987) (discussed in Lepschy 1987, 1988; Lepschy et al. 2001), as well as Robustelli (2000, 2013), Sapegno (2010) etc. ‘A parallel discussion for Spanish is found in Roca (2009). But even a plain list of references on this heated topic would challenge the space limitation, even for a monograph such as the present one.54 Grammatical gender in Romance: The mainstream ‘The noun fratello, which must be selected in (41a), is masculine, as would be an adjective agreeing with the same subject noun popolo, and the same goes for feminine sorella in (41b), which, unlike fratello, can be predicated of (feminine) nazione. Nouns with alternating gender—on which see below, $4.3.5—also induce gender restrictions ‘on nouns predicated of them, or used appositionally with them: (42) a. il braccio fratello/**sorella It. ‘the brother arm’ b. delle braccia sorelle/**fratelli (see Morselli 1919: 134) ‘brother arms’ ‘As remarked by Maiden (2016b: 136), the same occurs in Romanian, where the class of gender-alternating nouns, traditionally termed ‘neuter’ (see $4.4.1), is large and productive: (43) a. un popor frate/**sora Ro. ‘a brother people” b. doua popoare surori/**frati ‘two sister peoples’ Maiden takes this as evidence against the recognition of a neuter gender in Romanian, to which popor belongs: ‘If genus alternans nouns constituted a third gender which is neither masculine nor feminine, these restrictions on metaphorical matching of sex and grammatical gender would be inexplicable; but they make perfect sense if we accept that these are simply nouns whose singulars are masculine, and whose plurals are feminine’ [emphasis in the original—M.L.]. As the emphasis suggests, this objec- tion capitalizes on the etymological value of ‘neuter’ (i.e. neither-nor). However, the only legitimate reading of ‘neuter’ in the context of synchronic analysis is as a label for a gender value, which—according to definition (7), Chapter 1—can be a purely syncretic (controller) gender value, including one which is defined by masculine agree- mentin the singular and feminine agreement in the plural, as argued for the Romanian neuter in §4.4.1. The fact that such a value is non-autonomous (see Corbett 201: 459-60) implies that it inherits all properties from its components (M.sG and FPL in our case), including the restriction on the gender of nouns in personifications such as in (41)-(43). As for inanimates, grammars contain lists of semantic rules of the form ‘category x,y’ — ‘gender a, For example, ‘city names are feminine’ in Portuguese (Perini 2002: 94: a linda Ouro Preto ‘the beautiful OP’), or in Italian (e.g. la vecchia Milano ‘old.F Milan’). However, such ‘rules’ are hedged with qualifications, listing synchronic exceptions (Pg. 0 Porto ‘Oporto’, including the M form of the article) and/or pointing to variation, synchronic (natives of Recife usually say 0 Recife é lind-o ‘R. is beautiful-m’, whereas Brazilians of other provenance say Recife é lind-a F) and diachronic: Thornton (2003: 475) shows that Italian city names were still subject to a formal gender assignment rule in the nineteenth century (mezzo Milano ‘half.F Milan), of the kind observed in Spanish (la Cérdoba antigua vs el Madrid antiguo ‘old.r/m Cérdoba/Madrid; depending on the ending of the city’s name). More generally, Thornton (2003) concludes that most3.2 Gender assignment rules 55 grammars’ semantic rules, except for sex-congruency, are not psychologically real in Italian, and that it might be that, should they exist, such rules may only assign feminine, masculine being assigned by default. Thornton (2009: 31) adds that another widespread type of semantic rule, referring to the gender of the hyperonym, may be valid if restricted to hyperonyms which are Basic Level terms (Rosch et al. 1976). Even if devoid of psychological reality, and thus not qualifiable as semantic assignment rules stricto sensu, some semantic correlations for specific areas of the lexicon are observed, many of which have an historical explanation. One of the better described ones is that accounting for pairs of related fruit and tree names. These were neuter vs feminine in Latin, respectively (Touratier 1994: 82; Wilkinson 1985-91: 74), with tree-names mostly belonging to second declension (pirus,-i vs pirum,-i). This generally led to an ‘unsurprising reanalysis of tree names as masculines’ (Maiden 2011: 172), while fruit names mostly became feminine (via reanalysis of the NPL ending -a): for example Ro. par(ul)/peri(i) (the) pear tree/-s’ vs par(a/-a)/pere(le) (the) pear/-s, It. il pero/i peri vs la pera/le pere: derivational suffixation (Fr. le poirier, vs la poire) yields feminine tree-labels in Pg. a pereira (vs. a pera) and Cat. la perera (vs. la pera) (see Roché 2000). Romansh departs from the rest of Romance in displaying two series of co-existing lexemes for fruit names, masculine count (e.g. Sts. il pér/ils pérs) and feminine collective (Srs. la péra ‘the pears, Lausberg 1976: 25). Romanian, on the other hand, still preserves neuter mdr(ul), pl. mere(le) ‘apple/-s’ (see $4.4.1 below for discussion of the Romanian gender system and its alternating neuter gender), contrasting with the masculine tree name mdr(ul), pl. meri(i) (in fact, all tree names are masculine in Romanian: see Perkowski and Vrabie 1986: 58, who also list a series of other minor semantic gender assignment rules). However, feminine fruit names are in the majority: prund ‘plum(r), cireas@ ‘cherry(e), etc. Central- southern Italian dialects are most conservative here, as at least some of them contrast masculine vs neuter systematically in this area. For instance the dialect of Agnone (province of Isernia: Meo 2003)—whose gender system is analysed in $4.5.34.5.4, see (129)—contrasts systematically plant vs fruit names, the former masculine, the latter neuter (Agnonese too has an alternating neuter like Romanian): (44) a. ru/ra mojla/pojra/sugrva ‘the.M.sG/M.PL apple/pear/rowan tree’ b. ru mojla/pojra/sugrva —_‘the.m.s apple/pear/rowan’ c. la majle/paire/sorve ‘ther. apples/pears/rowans’ An intermediate situation between this kind of central-southern dialect and Standard Italian is found in varieties of northern Lazio like that of Barbarano Romano (province of Viterbo, seen in (32)). Here, plant names are masculine, while the corresponding fruit names are feminine: (45) SINGULAR PLURAL m| er | perro/metlo | | | petre/melle ‘the pear/apple tree(m)’ F | la | pezra/mella pezre/-a//melle/-a | ‘the pear/apple(r)”

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