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Title:
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Gender Assignment in Modern Faroese
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Author:
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Hjalmar Petersen
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Degree Awarded:
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Universität Hamburg
, Department of German Studies
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Degree Date:
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2009
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Historical Linguistics
Morphology
Psycholinguistics
Semantics
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Subject Language(s):
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Faroese
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Director(s):
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Høskuldur Thráinsson
Kurt Braunmüller
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Abstract:
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This dissertation is currently the only comprehensive study of gender
assignment in a North Germanic language, and it clearly shows that gender
is based on rules. The reader is provided with solid evidence taken from
historical changes, borrowings and psycholinguistic tests that proves this
rule-based hypothesis. The dissertation treats gender assignment in Faroese
as mainly twofold: semantic assignment and morphological assignment, and
that the Assignment Hierarchy is shown to have some validity, although there
are obvious exceptions. There are six gender markers in morphological
assignment in addition to negative neuter and nouns denoting sounds. These
rules together with different semantic rules for animate nouns as well as
inanimate nouns show that gender divides the lexicon (especially nouns)
into classes which governs agreement.
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