Linguistics Theses and Dissertations

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Browsing Linguistics Theses and Dissertations by Author "Alhazmi, Mofareh"

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    Case and Gender Loss in Germanic, Romance, and Balkan Sprachbund Languages
    (University of Oregon, 2023-03-24) Alhazmi, Mofareh; Vakareliyska, Cynthia
    My dissertation investigates the loss of morphological case and grammatical gender in the Germanic, Romance, and Balkan Sprachbund languages. Crucial language-internal and language-external motivations are considered. To illustrate the changes of morphological cases, the languages are divided into historical stages. Every change in nominal inflection between stages is attributed to either sound change or analogical change; these choices are justified through consideration of historical sound changes and the motivations behind analogical processes. The changes are also discussed in terms of their effects on number syncretism, case and gender mergers, order of case loss, and the relationship between gender and declension.These motivations can be classified as language-internal or language-external. Phonological, morphosyntactic, and semantic factors are among the former. Different types of sound change can neutralize inflection differences, but two closely related types, prosodic change, and vowel reduction have been suggested as key causes in case and gender loss in IE languages. A usual direction of change in morphological case loss includes variation between two or more cases in one or more functions, followed by functional narrowing and occasionally a complete functional merger of the case markings. Similarly, there can be differences between a case and an analytic construction, which can lead to the former being replaced by the latter in some or all functions. External motivations for case and gender loss include the kinds of contact conditions that cause or accelerate simplification in internal developments. Essential contact situation is the establishment of a sprachbund, or linguistic region, which usually entails structural convergence among surrounding languages during a long period of profound contact. Interactions among number, case, and gender are analyzed using original quantitative measures of number syncretism on nouns and gender syncretism on agreement targets. Overall, the results of my study support the general hypothesis that the loss of case and gender categories can be explained by the neutralization of distinctions in these categories as a direct result of sound change and by the profiling of a more relevant category through analogical processes.