[Lingtyp] Contents of Lingtyp digest: Grammar leaking - Masculine nouns in singular, partly/strongly/wholly shifting to feminine plural

[Edmond Cane]

 Dear colleagues

I am interested in some insight and actual research into therange of “grammar leaking”. From a typological angle, and within a comparableframework, it may be interesting to see how different languages leak and towhat extent. 

I am observing a few features in Albanian that aretypologically interesting. There seems to be a significant number of masculinenouns switching to plural feminine. It is common to see masculine nouns inplural holding both masculine and feminine features, i.e. associated with femininepronouns and adjectives. The phenomenon varies considerably – some nouns show amild deviation or stronger tendency (for instance, masculine nouns in theenvironment of feminine pronouns  oradjectives at more than 90% of tokens) or even radically, at 100% making theuse of masculine plural ungrammatical for them - while they are clearlymasculine in their singular standard form, as well as in the cognitiveawareness of the speakers.

This feature is not isolated. From a rough observation, Isee that Albanian seems to be inclined to significant degree of “leaking” whichcould be relating to cognitive basis of Albanian language structure and inparticular, to factors pertaining to usage. However, this requires vasttypological data for evaluation.

I would appreciate any resources or research into suchserious deviation of grammatical regularity.

Best regards

Edmond Cane

Albanian language teacher

BISU, Beijing

  
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