Grammatical Gender in Maltese

Grammatical Gender in Maltese - Studia Typologica [STTYP]

1st edition

Hardback (10 Sep 2018)

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Publisher's Synopsis

Is grammatical gender merely stored as a syntactic property of nouns, or is it computed according to a noun's semantic, morphological and phonological properties every time it is required?
In many languages, gender appears to resist systematic treatment and can even cause problems for non-native learners. Native speakers of these languages appear to have no difficulty in assigning the correct grammatical gender to thousands of nouns in their language. Being an offshoot of Arabic, Maltese inherited a system comprising two gender categories, masculine and feminine. Numerous nouns were introduced in Maltese through contact with Sicilian and subsequently with Italian, two languages that also have a masculine/feminine-based gender system. However, the more recent contact, with English, seems to have complicated matters.
This work investigates how grammatical gender functions in Maltese, how native speakers apply different criteria to classify nouns, and how this choice is reflected in syntactic agreement. It also takes into consideration the wider psycholinguistic context that influences the choice of category, and provides valuable data for theories that seek to explain the linguistic categorization of nouns in various languages.

Book information

ISBN: 9783110603941
Publisher: De Gruyter
Imprint: De Gruyter Mouton
Pub date:
Edition: 1st edition
Language: English
Number of pages: 318
Weight: 590g
Height: 230mm
Width: 155mm
Spine width: 22mm