Gender assignment criteria for inanimate Latin-derived nouns in Italian: A diachronic analysis from Latin to Romance

This dissertation seeks to appraise whether the gender assignment of Latin-derived Italian inanimate nouns is semantically or morphologically-based. To solve the present empirical puzzle, it starts to delineate the scope of the thesis by defining the linguistic category of gender as offered by the literature, giving particular emphasis to the notion of syntactic agreement. After providing the relevant terminology and introducing the concept of gender assignment, it ventures into a detailed survey of the historical development and the present state of the gender language under scrutiny, studying it both from an ‘internal’ and ‘external’ perspective. This outline pays close attention to the evolution of Italian from Latin, as it represents its direct ancestor, and to the ways in which the two languages govern their gender assignment. After presenting the mechanisms determining the allocation of nouns to a gender category, it offers a number of hypotheses based on a critical review of the existing literature on Indo-European and Romance, dividing them into potential semantic and morphological criteria. Having established the research method, a corpus-based diachronic analysis, the study tests both semantic and morphological rules on a number of Latin and Italian texts divided into seven distinct historical periods. After comparing the results, it suggests the following hierarchical structure for the gender assignment of Latin-derived Italian inanimate nouns: a) Italian nouns deriving from first- and fifth-declensions referents are nearly always feminine; b) a number of hyponymy relations regulate the gender assignment regardless of morphology, except for nouns deriving from first- and fifth-declension referents; c) abstract nouns belonging to any declensional type are overwhelmingly feminine.