The Romanian alternating gender in diachrony and synchrony

Abstract

AbstractRomanian has a large class of nouns characterized by masculine agreement in the singular and feminine agreement in the plural. This phenomenon ofalternatinggender is frequently argued by traditional grammarians of Romanian, Romance linguists, and linguist typologists to constitute aneuterorthirdgender, distinct frommasculineandfeminine. The present study argues, from close analysis of a wide range of diachronic and comparative dialectal data, that theneuteris in fact an epiphenomenon of agreement behaviour that depends crucially on the inflexional identity of the singular and plural forms of the nouns. Hypostatization of athirdgender is dangerously liable to obfuscate the true mechanisms at work. Principled explanations of some apparent exceptions to my overall claim will be offered. I also investigate, however, some ways in which the emergence of a third gender of the type so widely assumed already to exist might be latent in Romanian, and speculate in general on howalternating gendermight emerge diachronically.