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Girl, you’ll be a woman soon : grammatical and/or semantic agreement with Greek hybrid nouns of the Mädchen type

Book Contribution - Book Abstract Conference Contribution

Greek grammarians distinguished five gender classes: masculine, feminine, neuter, common and epicene nouns. Common nouns denote sexed beings and differentiate them accordingly, e.g. ὁ παῖς ‘the boy’ ~ ἡ παῖς ‘the girl’. Epicene nouns denote sexed beings as well but do not differentiate them according to sex, e.g. ὁ ἀετός ‘the (male / female) eagle’ ~ ἡ ἀλώπηξ ‘the (male / female) fox’. There is, however, another class not recognized by the grammarians and that is the class of hybrid nouns, defined by Corbett as “nouns […] whose agreement specification varies according to the agreement target” (2015: 191). The agreement specification is determined by the Agreement Hierarchy (Corbett 1991: 226): “attributive > predicate > relative pronoun > personal pronoun”, of which he says: “For any controller that permits alternative agreements, as we move rightwards along the Agreement Hierarchy, the likelihood of agreement with greater semantic justification will increase monotonically” (2015: 193). One of the prototypical examples of a hybrid noun is German Mädchen, which always takes the neuter form of the article, but often the feminine form of the personal pronoun (Corbett 1991: 182, 227-8; 2015: 194). Corbett, following a personally communicated suggestion of Manfred Krifka, noted that “the older the girl in question, the more likely the feminine becomes (and conversely the neuter” (1991: 228). Braun and Haig confirmed this suggestion in their study of 302 native speakers of German and concluded that the choice depends on the “semantics of age” (2010: 70) as well as on the “semantics of femaleness” (2010: 82). In this paper I discuss the grammatical hybridity of Greek equivalents of German Mädchen: κόριον, κοράσιον, κορασίδιον, θυγάτριον, παρθένιον etc. I show that such nouns tend to follow the Agreement Hierarchy as well and that the semantics of age and of femaleness are as important in the gender assignment of Greek girls as they are in the case of German Mädchen. The Greek evidence confirms an important observation made by Braun and Haig in reference to the latter: “a natural boundary, that of puberty, appears to be relevant in the statistical distribution of feminine and neuter forms” (2010: 82). More specifically, they observed “a statistically valid preference to favour female forms when the Mädchen is presented as 18-years old, as opposed to twelve” (ibid.). Not surprisingly, the correlation between age, femaleness and semantic agreement differs significantly in the case of the Greek girls. References Braun, Friederike & Geoffrey Haig. 2010. “When are German ‘Girls’ Feminine? How the Semantics of Age Influences the Grammar of Gender Agreement”, in Markus Bieswanger, Heike Motschenbacher & Susanne Muhleisen (eds.), Language in its Socio-Cultural Context: New Explorations in Global, Medial and Gendered Uses, 69-84. Tübingen: Narr. Corbett, Greville C. 1991. Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Corbett, Greville C. 2015. “Hybrid Nouns and their complexity”, in Jürg Fleischer, Elisabeth Rieken & Paul Widmer (eds.), Agreement from a Diachronic Perspective, 191-214. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Janse, Mark. 2020. “Sex and Agreement: (Mis)matching Natural and Grammatical Gender in Greek”, Keria: Studia Latina et Graeca 22(2), 25-55.
Book: 14th Trends in Classics International Conference : Historical Linguistics and Classical Philology, Abstracts
Pages: 13 - 14
Publication year:2021
Accessibility:Open