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
Verlag/Hrsg.: Firenze University Press
Schlagwörter: Agreement / Gender / Germanic / Nanosyntax / Possessive Pronouns
Sprache: Englisch
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-29065789
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
Powered By: BASE
Link(s) : https://oaj.fupress.net/index.php/bsfm-qulso/article/view/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.