Complex possessive pronouns in West Flemish and German
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Quaderni Di Linguistica E Studi Orientali |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Web | https://oaj.fupress.net/index.php/bsfm-qulso/article/view/15159 |
| Doi | http://dx.doi.org/10.36253/qulso-2421-7220-15159 |
| Keywords | agreement; gender; Germanic; nanosyntax; possessive pronouns |
| Description | 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. |
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