Sep 2026· Trends in Social Sciences and Humanities Research· 0 citations· 22 references
Abstract
From old English to modern English, the gender category has shifted from a grammatical system to a natural one, with only pronouns retaining gender marking. He and they used as epicene pronouns represent a common phenomenon of gender disagreement. This study examines epicene pronoun usage with anaphors restricted to possessives (his, their) and antecedents to compound indefinite pronouns (someone, somebody), considering writing form, prefix and suffix semantics, and frequency. Results show that their is increasingly used as the epicene pronoun while his declines, a trend influenced by social factors as well as the semantics and frequency of antecedents. The use of plural their in anaphoric reference to singular indefinite pronouns can be viewed as number variation, and its replacement of his as a change in both gender and number category. Among candidates for the gender-neutral function, their proves the most promising based on diachronic evidence.
This article discusses emergent empirical data about the Mandarin Chinese collective suffix ‑men, in that it is able to mark a zero anaphor. This is a marked zero pronoun, a covert element (a zero anaphor) marked by an overt element (‑men). The licensing of this anaphoric element has yet to be captured, which is appr...
Darcy Sperlich· International Review of Prag...· 0 citations
The paper argues that developments and changes in relative-clause formation in Ukrainian since the end of the 18th c. are due to lexical variation between a relative particle, typically ščo ‘that’, with or without a resumptive pronoun, and the relative pronouns jakyj and kotryj ‘which’. This repertory of relativisers i...
Jan Fellerer· Revue des études slaves· 0 citations
The current study investigates how adult Romanian speakers choose between overt and null pronoun subjects in inter-sentential anaphoric contexts, and how their choices are shaped by two interacting factors: contrast and animacy. Our results from two forced choice tasks conducted on adult native speakers of Romanian sho...
A. C. Bleotu, E. Levina· Catalan Journal of Linguisti...· 0 citations
This study examines the use of English grammatical elements in fashion magazines targeting young women published in Japan. A total of 48 tables of contents from three different magazine series were analysed using a list of categories created on the basis of pre‑analysis. These categories include the following: func...
The case category of English nouns has undergone substantial structural and functional changes throughout the historical development of the English language. From the relatively rich inflectional system of Old English to the reduced morphology of Middle English and the predominantly analytical structure of Modern Engli...
Javid Babayev· Global Spectrum of Research...· 0 citations
The placeholder verb construction, which has emerged relatively recently in colloquial Georgian, offers a unique case study of grammaticalization in progress: the emergence of a structurally innovative type of verb within a language whose verbal morphology is already quite complex. Derived from reanalysis of the event-...
Steven Foley, Nino Amiridze· Natural language & linguisti...· 0 citations
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