A Comparative Analysis of Neutral Gender in Asturian and South Italian Romance Varieties
| Autoři | |
|---|---|
| Rok publikování | 2025 |
| Druh | Další prezentace na konferencích |
| Fakulta / Pracoviště MU | |
| Citace | |
| Popis | This paper investigates the status and functions of the so-called neutro de materia in Asturian in comparative perspective with southern Italo-Romance varieties such as Sicilian, Calabrian, and Neapolitan. While the Asturian neutral category has often been treated as either a conservative retention of Latin or an autonomous internal innovation, I advance the hypothesis that its persistence and distribution are better understood in light of structural parallels with South Italian Romance. Both areas display non-binary gender distinctions, especially in the treatment of mass and collective nouns, in adjectival and pronominal agreement, and in the interface between morphology and semantics. Methodologically, the study combines corpus-based analysis of contemporary Asturian texts, examination of descriptive grammars and dialect atlases of southern Italian Romance, and comparative morphosyntactic analysis informed by Indo-European and Romance historical linguistics. This triangulated approach, carried out from the perspective of Central Europe, integrates existing digital corpora (e.g. Corpus Oral y Sonoro del Asturianu), published dialectological materials, and secondary typological databases. By reframing the Asturian neutral as part of a wider Mediterranean zone of structural convergence, the paper contributes to ongoing debates on language contact, grammatical gender, and areal typology. It underscores the need to consider Romance varieties in parallel rather than isolation, showing how contact and areal dynamics shape the persistence, refunctionalization, and perception of grammatical categories across Europe. |
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