Gender from Latin to Romance by Michele Loporcaro (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Gender from Latin to Romance by Michele Loporcaro John M. Ryan Michele Loporcaro. Gender from Latin to Romance. Oxford UP, 2018. 368 p. Gender from Latin to Romance is a scholarly comparative analysis of the history, geography and typology of grammatical gender systems across the various Romance languages and dialects. Consisting of eight chapters, it begins with an overview, the method used for the study, and some basic facts and observations about gender systems worldwide. Serving as a springboard for the remainder of the book, chapter two lays out the comprehensive grammatical gender system of Classical Latin as the baseline against which modern languages are to compared. Chapter 3 discusses most common and widely known modern gender systems of the Romance languages, including the binary systems of Italian, Spanish or French. This is followed immediately by another section on gender assignment rules. Chapters 4 through 6 go on to treat more complex Romance gender systems that have been either attested in present-day languages or dialects or documented in past stages of Romance. This includes remnants of the neuter, languages with three gender systems as in Romanian, as well as the correlation between the mass/count noun distinction and gender in Asturian. Diverging from his approach for the earlier chapters, Loporcaro then undertakes the task of providing a comprehensive reconstruction of the development of grammatical gender from Latin to Romance, including such topics as the rise of the genus alternans, gradual depletion of the neuter, and the rise and fall of a four-gender [End Page 217] system. The concluding chapter deals with themes outside the realm of diachronic topics and moves to a more typological focus and the wider implications of four gender systems, internally motivated versus contact-induced change, and syntactically-dependent overt gender marking. Gender from Latin to Romance, the twenty-seventh monograph of the Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics series, offers several advantages to scholars within linguistics as well as those in other fields, such as sociology, psychology, and gender studies. It provides the first ever, one-stop compilation of research on grammatical gender across the entirety of the Romance language family. This showcases the wide variety of outcomes in gender systems that have transpired across the neo-Latin languages, far beyond the more familiar binary system among the mainstream languages of French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, and includes details about less widely studied languages like Sursilvan, Neapolitan, and Asturian. It also makes references beyond the Italic family to show where those languages share aspects with Romance, and reviews the work conducted by others on evidence for grammatical gender on the ancestral languages preceding Latin, most notably on Proto-Indo-European by Matasovic (2004) and others. Another strength lies in its sound methodology that explains the different manifestations of gender systems both within and outside of Romance, dedicating ample space to examine the previous seminal work of Corbet (1991) on the wider topic of grammatical gender. Specifically, Loporcaro's application of the controller versus target dichotomy is largely effective. Gender from Latin to Romance provides exhaustive description, documentation, and comparison of the different gender systems, both simple and complex, that have evolved between Latin and the many neo-Latin tongues of today. Although it is not intended as a textbook on the subject, it would serve as a suitable complementary manual of copious examples for students who are studying grammatical gender as a linguistic phenomenon in any context. [End Page 218] John M. Ryan University of Northern Colorado Copyright © 2019 Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association