Complex Possessive Pronouns in West Flemish and German

In this article we discuss a contrastive, morphological agreement pattern exhibited by singular possessive pronouns in West Flemish and German. While West Flemish zen (‘his’) and eur (‘her’) require a suffix -en to mark masculine agreement, they are unmarked for feminine agreement. Conversely, German sein (‘his’) and ihr (‘her’) require a suffix -e to mark feminine agreement, but they are unmarked for masculine agreement. Put differently, in both languages only one gender is marked for agreement, and West Flemish marks a different gender than German. To account for this intra- and cross-lingui... Mehr ...

Verfasser: Demonie, Anne-Li
Goryczka, Pamela
Dokumenttyp: Artikel
Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
Reihe/Periodikum: Quaderni di Linguistica e Studi Orientali ; volume 9, page 59-79 ; ISSN 2421-7220
Verlag/Hrsg.: Firenze University Press
Sprache: unknown
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-26700288
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
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Link(s) : http://dx.doi.org/10.36253/qulso-2421-7220-15159

In this article we discuss a contrastive, morphological agreement pattern exhibited by singular possessive pronouns in West Flemish and German. While West Flemish zen (‘his’) and eur (‘her’) require a suffix -en to mark masculine agreement, they are unmarked for feminine agreement. Conversely, German sein (‘his’) and ihr (‘her’) require a suffix -e to mark feminine agreement, but they are unmarked for masculine agreement. Put differently, in both languages only one gender is marked for agreement, and West Flemish marks a different gender than German. To account for this intra- and cross-linguistic variation, we argue for a fine-grained analysis, couched in Nanosyntax (Starke 2009 et seq.), of the possessive pronouns and their agreement markers.