Gender/number syncretism and neutralisation in Germanic possessive agreement
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| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| Citation | |
| Description | In this paper, we examine the morphological agreement markings of 3rd person possessive pronouns (POSS) in Germanic languages. Some of these markings form unexpected patterns from the perspective of gender markedness. While it is argued that feminine is a marked category and masculine and neuter are both unmarked (cf. Spathas & Sudo 2020, Kramer 2015, Adamson & Šereikaite 2019, Jakobson 1984 a.o.), these POSS show patterns where marked features lack morphological realisation, and unmarked ones are realised. We propose an analysis in Nanosyntax (Starke 2009) which can account for these surprising patterns without abandoning well- established markedness distinctions. |
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