| Title: | Cognitive categories and noun classification. Romance neuter: from [passivity] to [indifference] |
| Author: | Maria M. Manoliu |
| Publication: | Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics, XI (1) |
| p-ISSN: | 2069-9239 |
| Publisher: | Universitatea din București |
| Place: | București |
| Year: | 2009 |
| Abstract: | The present contribution aims to reveal the ways in which the evolution of the grammatical category of gender from Latin to Romance reflects the dramatic changes undergone by its semantic domains. Arguments for the hypothesis that Latin gender oppositions were determined by the important role played by activeness (and not animacy) in the interpretation of the state of affairs are brought into the picture in order to explain the subcategorization of nouns in both Latin and in Romance. The term activeness is to be understood as a reflection of the ‘capacity of referents for influencing human life in positive or negative ways’. The changes undergone by grammatical gender in Romance languages were triggered not only by a morpho-syntactic reorganization of case and number, but also by social and pragmatic factors that triggered a reorganization of cognitive categories and their linguistic encoding |
| Key words: | activeness, animacy, cognitive categories, grammatical gender, noun classes |
| Links: |  pdf  html |
Citations to this publication: 0
References in this publication: 3
| 160 | Alexandru Rosetti | Istoria limbii române Ediție definitivă | Editura Științifică și Enciclopedică | 1986 | |
| 97 | Roman Jakobson | Essais de linguistique générale I. Les Fondations du langage, II. Rapports internes et externes du langage | Éditions de Minuit | 1963, 1973 | |
| 66 | Antoine Meillet | Linguistique historique et linguistique générale | Champion/Slatkine | 1912, 1921; 1982 |
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