N morphology and its interpretation
We characterize Romance inflectional class morphology in Nouns as endowed with a semantic content, providing evidence about its active involvement at the syntaxsemantic interface. We argue that the so-called neuter of Central Italian dialects involves coding of the mass/count distinction, which can...
| Autores: | , , |
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| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2015 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona |
| Repositorio: | Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB |
| Idioma: | inglés |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:ddd.uab.cat:145066 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://ddd.uab.cat/record/145066 https://dx.doi.org/urn:doi:10.5565/rev/isogloss.14 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Nominal class Gender Agreement Neuter Mass/count distinction |
| Sumario: | We characterize Romance inflectional class morphology in Nouns as endowed with a semantic content, providing evidence about its active involvement at the syntaxsemantic interface. We argue that the so-called neuter of Central Italian dialects involves coding of the mass/count distinction, which can in turn be interpreted as the reflex of a more primitive property, opposes non-individual content to instances of individual denotation. Indeed the -o 'neuter' inflection of Central Italian varieties is compatible not only with mass nouns but also with eventive contents and with the invariable inflections found with perfect participles of unergative/transitive verbs. We show that mass vs. count semantic content is available in other Indo-European languages and in genetically unrelated languages through nominal class morphology supporting the idea that nominal class is a classifier. |
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