Gender as an inflectional category  

Oleh:

Spencer, Andrew

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Journal of Linguistics (Full Text & ada di PROQUEST & JSTOR) vol. 38 no. 1 (Jul. 2002), page 279-312.
Fulltext: gender.pdf (345.63KB)

Isi artikel

Russian adjectives, especially participles, can be used as nouns denoting people, e.g. bol«noj}bol«naja `(male}female) patient' from bol«noj ` sick ', uc] as] c] ijsja}uc] as] c] ajasja `(boy}girl) pupil', participle from the verb uc] it«sja ` to learn, study'. These are unusual in that they formally re¯ect the sex of their referent by means of in¯ectional morphology. Moreover, many surnames in¯ect like adjectives and they, too, in¯ect for gender: Mr. Pus] kin, Cw exov, Tolstoj, Dostoevskij but Ms. Pus] kina, Cw exova, Tolstaja, Dostoevskaja. Lexemes such as ` patient, pupil' are genuine nouns and not just adjectives modifying null nouns. The latter type do exist and have different properties from converted nouns. Converted nouns and adjectival surnames thus form systematic gender pairs which are forms of a single lexeme. However, gender is not conventionally regarded as an in¯ection category of the kind which induces word forms of lexemes in this way, rather it is an inherent ` classi®catory ' property of nouns. The paper discusses the peculiar nature of this type of in¯ectional marking and provides an explicit analysis of the construction. On the semantic side, nouns such as bol«noj, uc] as] c] ijsja have a similar representation to that of a phrase person who is sick}studies and we effectively have an instance of the poorly researched phenomenon of de-phrasal word formation. On the morphosyntactic side, the lexical entry of the deadjectival noun or surname shares crucial properties with 3rd person pronouns. The analysis raises questions about the nature of lexical categories (especially `mixed categories') and the structure of lexical entries generally.u

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